


for the body buried by the interstate

by greatunironic



Category: Criminal Minds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 15:25:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greatunironic/pseuds/greatunironic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was someone they loved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

> (for bau_bigbang. the idea of this story came frombatgurl88 by way ofcmplotbunnyfarm. huge thanks to my beta, a_dreamwithin. title from iron & wine’s peace beneath the city.)

 

 _Ah, the strange, sweet, lonely delight  
      Of the Valleys of Dream.   
                  William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod)_   
  
  
When she was very little, Miranda Jones used to dream that her family wasn’t hers. She used to dream that, someday, maybe when she was sitting down to dinner, the phone would ring or the doorbell would sound, and a man would be there, telling her that this wasn’t where she belonged. She belonged with him, and his pretty, pretty wife and their other children. They would take her away.   
  
On her thirteenth birthday, she realized she was growing up to look exactly like her mom, with colorless eyes and a too big nose and brown hair that only looked good in braids. No one was ever coming to tell her where she really belonged.   
  
So Miranda’s dream changed: someday, another type of man would come along and show her a new life.   
  
  
  
Deep down in Sub-Basement Three of Quantico, in Archives Room Four where there were no windows, Miranda Jones, now twenty-four and an archivist extraordinaire, was waist deep in files from the Cold Case Unit. Agent Ryan—the older one who could spell, not the young guy who used far too many exclamation marks—had brought down a series of cases that had just been transferred into cold case and he had asked Miranda to put them into chronological order for him because, and she quoted, the yahoos in Missing Persons couldn’t work numbers worth a damn.   
  
Miranda liked Agent Ryan, mainly because he didn’t treat her like a glorified librarian but like a qualified agent, despite not quite being an agent—she really was more of a librarian than anything, though she did dream of becoming a field agent someday, working the cases that she’d put away. There were very few agents in the FBI that came down to the archives in Sub-Basement Three who treated her as anything other than glorified librarian or even human index card.   
  
So she was waist deep in the boxes of files, trying to put them into waist high stacks in accordance to their appropriate case file alphanumeric designations, when Agent Jareau of the BAU appeared. Miranda also liked Agent Jareau. Really, she liked all the members of the BAU. They all seemed so nice and so good at their jobs, when they came down to the archives for a file or two. Even SSA Hotchner, who didn’t ever really look happy, seemed like he’d be nice if you got him talking.   
  
She didn’t really get people talking. People weren’t really her thing.   
  
Her work was her thing.   
  
No one ever appreciated that.  
  
Smiling politely, Miranda put down the file she had been sorting and waited for Agent Jareau to tell her what she needed.   
  
“There’s a box of case files upstairs,” said Agent Jareau, staring down the shadowed aisles of Miranda’s archives, “that need to get put away. They’re from our cases, about two years ago, and they just got put into the electronic system.”   
  
Miranda carefully did not make a face at the mention of the system. She hated that thing. The paper files were totally better than the stuff on the computers—those things didn’t even include all the notes, the bits that the agents had written in the margins and the bottoms of the pages.   
  
If there was anything that Miranda had learned from Agent Ryan of the Cold Case Unit and Agent Rossi of the BAU, who was always espousing the virtues of the archives to Miranda whenever he would come down—usually Tuesdays; he said he liked it there—it was that the paper files were the best and only way to go for agents. The new crop of agents, who relied on the electronic system, just weren’t going to be the best.   
  
“Anyway, I thought I’d let you know,” Agent Jareau was saying. “I figured I could take you up to the bullpen and you could get them, put them away.”   
  
“Yes,” Miranda said, nodding. “Okay.”   
  
“Great,” said Agent Jareau.   
  
Miranda carefully adjusted the files she had been working with, the ones that she had put down when Agent Jareau had arrived, and then followed her out of Archives Four and into the hallway, where the elevator up out of Sub-Basement Three was located.   
  
Agent Jareau pushed the call button with one un-manicured nail and they waited for the elevator to arrive. Miranda, quietly and politely, enquired about Agent Jareau’s husband and son.   
  
“Oh,” said Agent Jareau as the elevator dinged its arrival and the doors opened. “Henry!”   
  
She launched into a spirited story about Henry and his latest adventure in finger painting, and Miranda listened avidly. She didn’t know anyone besides Agent Jareau who had kids, or even a husband—Miranda’s three brothers weren’t married yet—and she liked hearing about children. They always seemed so funny.   
  
Henry seemed like an amazing little kid, well behaved but lively, like his mother, and so she always asked about him and Agent Jareau was always willing to tell a story or three. She liked talking about her son and always sounded so proud of him.  
  
Miranda thought that Agent Jareau actually liked talking to Miranda too—she was actually trying to get her to call her J.J. and everything. One time she even asked her to lunch! But Miranda had declined; she’d had a lot of work to do that afternoon. And she felt weird calling Agent Jareau anything other than Agent Jareau, because that’s what she was. She was an agent. She was Agent Jareau.   
  
When the elevator came to a halt on Floor Seven, where the Behavioral Analysis Unit had high and lofty windows, Agent Jareau had just finished telling the story.   
  
“I’ll bring it in,” she said, as they exited. “It’s great.”   
  
Miranda nodded and followed Agent Jareau into the bullpen.   
  
Her eyes downcast to the floor as they walked through to Agent Jareau’s office, Miranda could still see all the agents, who hadn’t noticed that they entered. SSA Hotchner was shut away in his office, no doubt doing highly important work, and Agents Rossi and Prentiss were outside of Rossi’s own office, leaning up against the door frame and chatting about something as they drank their morning coffees. She could see the back of Agent Morgan in the break room, his dark head bent over the coffee maker as he did something to it. She figured Miss Garcia was in her office somewhere, doing battle with the internet and finding clues about the BAU’s newest case.   
  
She wondered what it was. It was probably terribly interesting and important.   
  
Soon enough, Agent Jareau and Miranda were inside Agent Jareau’s cluttered but well organized office. Miranda liked that, a kind of organized chaos. It seemed to fit well with Agent Jareau’s personality: that there was so much stuff to do in one room but Agent Jareau knew where it all was and what it was all about.   
  
“It’s over here,” said Agent Jareau, stepping behind her desk. She disappeared for a moment, crouching down, and then her blonde head popped up with a burst of energy, box of files held in her arms. “There’s a second one,” she said. “I forgot. You get this one and I’ll get the other.”  
  
Miranda started to shake her head in disagreement as she took the box from Agent Jareau. She could just come back up for it, she wanted to say. Another trip was no big deal to Miranda. She liked visiting the BAU anyway.   
  
But Agent Jareau was giving Miranda the first box of files and then grabbing the second. She started to head out of her office and Miranda, first box in her arms, could only trail in her wake.   
  
They went into the bullpen again.   
  
“Hey, J.J.,” called Agent Morgan from the break room. He exited shortly thereafter, a coffee cup in one hand as the other dabbed a washcloth at a nonexistent stain on his shirt. He winked at Miranda, saying, “Miss Jones. How are you?”   
  
She looked at the floor, blushing and mumbling a, “Fine,” as she continued to trail after Agent Jareau, who had thrown a, “Morning, Morgan,” over her shoulder at him.   
  
He grinned.   
  
Agent Rossi smiled at her too, as they passed. He raised his coffee cup in salute at her. “Morning, Miss Jones. You hard at work, filing away our important files then?”   
  
Miranda nodded, glancing up briefly to look at Agent Rossi. She didn’t quite meet his eyes. She wasn’t very good at that.   
  
“J.J., let me get that,” Agent Prentiss was saying, pushing away from the door and heading down the steps to them, her shiny black t-straps clicking on the tiled floor. Miranda thought that Agent Prentiss probably had the best shoes out of anyone who worked for the Bureau—they were always so beautiful and awesome; maybe not entirely practical for field work, not that Miranda really knew what field work entailed. She imagined Agent Prentiss had sneakers or something she changed into.   
  
“Emily,” said Agent Jareau.   
  
“I need to go down there anyway,” said Agent Prentiss, reaching out for Agent Jareau’s box of files. “I need some of my old notes on a case from a while back, for a paper I’m working on for Davies in Homicide.”   
  
“Prentiss, I’m pleased,” Agent Rossi said from his doorway. “It’s good to see that since I’ve come along you’ve all started to embrace Miss Jones’s archives as highly important to our work. There’s nothing greater for an agent than his—or her—old notes in the case files.”   
  
Agent Prentiss rolled her eyes and said drily, “Yeah, Rossi, I know. I’ve always been a fan of the archives. It’s not like you just showed up and I said to myself,  _Damn, what have I been missing out on this whole time?_  Sorry to shatter your dreams but no light bulb went off for me. Give me a little credit.”   
  
As Agent Jareau laughed, Agent Rossi sent Agent Prentiss a hurt look. Miranda tried to look like she wasn’t listening interestedly.   
  
“No credit here,” threw in Agent Morgan. “I was totally in the dark.”   
  
Agent Jareau laughed harder.   
  
“Well, now that we’ve got that cleared up,” said Agent Prentiss. She shifted the weight of her box of files and said, “Let’s get this show on the road, Miranda.”   
  
Miranda nodded. Agent Prentiss started to make her way out of the bullpen.   
  
“Have a good day, Miss Jones,” said Agent Rossi to her, heading for his office. Miranda nodded once more and Agent Jareau said her goodbyes as well. Agent Morgan ambled over to his desk and sat, drinking his coffee.   
  
“Miss Jones.”   
  
He winked at Miranda again. She died a little but soldiered on and followed Agent Prentiss to the elevator.   
  
Agent Prentiss was nice to Miranda, like all the other agents of the BAU were, but it was the kind of nice that was almost like she was trying really hard, nearly too hard to be friendly. It was as if she was going out of her way to be something that she wasn’t.   
  
It was both charming and sad, Miranda figured, that she had to force herself to be that way.   
  
Well, not force. Agent Prentiss probably was really nice but she wanted to be super nice, nicer than anyone in the room. Miranda didn’t know much about Agent Prentiss’s background but she did know a little something about her mother, the ambassador, and some of it became clear when she put that into the equation.   
  
Miranda knew a lot about not wanting to become your parents.   
  
The elevator ride down to Archives Four seemed shorter than the ride up from it. They stepped off, boxes in hand, and headed into the archives. Agent Prentiss set down her box of files onto Miranda’s desk and walked in a small circle in the open center of the room, looking at the rows of filing cabinets and shelving that spread on down into darkness.  
  
“I like it here,” she said, smiling lightly, “and I’ve liked it since before Dave showed up.”   
  
Miranda shifted on her feet, still holding her own box, as she watched Agent Prentiss stop her circles and stare down into the deep.  
  
“I mean,” she was saying, “all these files, all these lives. You get to see the histories of hundreds of agents in these rooms, in those boxes, intertwined with the lives of the people that they had saved, or tried to—”   
  
Agent Prentiss broke off, a small frown on her face, staring at the box of cases Miranda held. Miranda looked down at it but she couldn’t see anything on it, except for the numeric designations of which files were inside.   
  
“I should get going,” said Agent Prentiss, still frowning. “Get my files and let you get back to work.”   
  
“Okay,” Miranda said, tightening her hold on her box as she stepped to her desk to set it down. She looked down at the box for a moment and then started to open up the shut case, pulling the flaps of cardboard open. She looked back up, about to ask if Agent Prentiss needed help finding something.   
  
A file drawer opened and shut, and Agent Prentiss was striding out of one of the aisles, a folder clutched in her hand. She smiled at Miranda as she left but it didn’t quite meet her eyes.   
  
Miranda looked back at the box.   
  
“What are you?” she asked it, quietly, and plunged a hand in.   
  
She pulled out several thin files and set about filing them away. It only took her a few minutes—she had basically created this filing system and so she knew it like the back of her hand. Putting a few thin files from the BAU into it was something she could have done in her sleep. She went back to the box to grab another few files to put away and came out instead with one thick one. It actually had some weight to it, it was that big.   
  
Miranda blinked, staring. She rarely got files this big. She wondered what it could be. She wondered if it was the file that had made Agent Prentiss frown so.   
  
Shaking her head at her silliness, she hefted the thing and glanced at the code on the file before heading down the appropriate aisle. As she began to stick it away on the shelf, her grip slipped on the huge thing and she nearly dropped it.   
  
She scrambled to correct her grip but she couldn’t stop something from sliding out. A bit of paper fell down through the air, slicing through like a butterfly without its wings. It hit the ground with a soft noise and Miranda tucked to file it belonged to under her arm as she bent to get it.   
  
And she wasn’t going to look at it—really, she wasn’t but—   
  
It was a picture of a young man, a standard Bureau one, the kind for IDs, but it had been blown up for the file. He was smiling nervously and not looking directly into the camera, his eyes just off of center.  
  
It gave Miranda some pause. Her ID picture was like that too. She wasn’t precisely good at meeting anyone in the eye, not even a camera. Miranda stared at the picture of the young man that had fallen from her file as it lay on the floor, wondering who he was. She had never seen him before. Granted, locked up as she was in her archives, she really didn’t see that many people, except for the select few that followed the ways of Agent Rossi. But she would venture out for her lunch and for the occasional snack in a vending machine. And yet she had never seen him.  _  
  
Two years_ , she thought. Perhaps it was because he was before her time?   
  
She carefully picked up the photo of the mysterious man, her fingers just along the edges, not wanting to touch it should she smudge it. She stared again and then blinked before looking this way and that; and, seeing that no one was around, she opened the file.   
  
She just wanted to see who he was, she reasoned to herself. That would make it easier for her to put the photograph back into the folder.   
  
Miranda smiled at her reasoning and paged through, eyes bouncing off the words. She saw the names of the agents of the BAU and some places that she recognized. She tried to pick out a name she wasn’t familiar with—maybe he was an old BAU agent?  
  
It was just, he looked so young, barely older than Miranda herself in the picture.   
  
Towards the end of one of the case files, Miranda caught sight of something that made her heart pound in her throat.  
 _  
_

_SSA Morgan sustained a gunshot wound to the chest and was taken immediately to the hospital. I was also taken by ambulance to the hospital, though I do not really remember it: I had been struck with a tire iron and knocked unconscious._

_SA Prentiss and SSA Hotchner were also wounded but refused medical assistance, attempting to follow after the two men who had taken SSA Reid._

 

She looked again at the photo and thought,  _SSA Reid?  
_

Miranda flicked to the beginning of that one file. It was Agent Rossi’s report on what happened. And she paged through the rest of the files, realizing that it was in fact a collection of reports on the same incident from all the agents of the BAU.   
  
And the incident in question, she learned from the cover page of the file, was the shooting of SSA Derek Morgan, the injuring of SSA Hotchner, SSA Rossi, and SA Prentiss, and the kidnapping and presumed murder of one SSA Doctor Spencer Reid of the BAU.   
  
“Oh,” she said to herself. Her voice sound loud and huge in the dark quiet of the archives.  
  
She put the picture of SSA Doctor Spencer Reid back into the file and stood up, intent on putting it away, but her fingers itched where the photo had touched them, and she thought,  _What could it hurt?_    
  
Miranda went back to her desk and cleared it off, setting the file down once more.   
  
She bit her lip as she sat down in front of it. She had never done this before.   
  
She opened it to the front again, to the photograph where she had put it back.   
  
Spencer was very handsome. Beautiful, even.   
  
If you had not have fallen _, she thought to the picture, _I would not have found you._    
  
_Miranda stared at him for a long while yet.   
  
  
  
This was what happened:   
  
On a Thursday, when it was raining prior to snow, Mary Meno was taken from a street corner in Annapolis, Maryland. One week later, her disappearance was connected to that of several young women; they were all blonde, in their early twenties, and attractive, from around Maryland and Virginia. When the BAU was called in, they were the ones who connected Mary and the others to a series of dead bodies buried by the interstate. The bodies found, in various states of decomposition, were beaten, starved, and sexually abused before they were killed. Mostly, they were strangulations; one was from starvation.   
  
It was wintertime, when the BAU did receive the call from the State Police of Maryland. It was February and the biggest snowstorm of the decade had just rolled in, painting the world white and destroying evidence. Wherever Mary Meno was, it was certainly cold, and it would probably stay cold for quite a while.   
  
Mary’s family had been certain that they didn’t know the kidnapper and the BAU, after careful consideration, decided that they were correct in that assumption.   
  
Upon speaking to the other families, that conclusion was strengthened. And, yet, they did not think they were random. These young, blonde, attractive women, for several days, had been watched and followed beforehand; they had been stalked, their paths and habits noted, and they had been hunted down.   
  
They found a single suspect: the brother of a handsome mechanic in the town where one of the victims had lived, had grown up, had worked, had visited recently, or had friends therein. They were interviewed, separately, and the handsome one expressed remorse; the evil looking one as well. They were called Walt and Kevin Francis, and the revelation of their existence lead to the realization that the crimes were being committed by a pair.   
  
In the file, there were pictures: of the warehouse where they found Mary Meno blessedly alive, of the graves of the other lost young women, of blood splattered on the ground, parts of all the agents of the BAU bleed into the concrete of the place where they lost him.   
  
And then there were the brothers: one was handsome, classic, like a Greek carving; the other was not. His nose was thin, his pale eyes set wide apart, and his ears were all wrong; it was as if someone had ripped them off, twisted them about and round, and then placed them back on backwards. His hair was blond, his chin weak, and his mouth small and pinched. He looked evil, stereotypically so, like the man you would see tying the hero’s love to the train tracks in a black and white film.   
  
It was hard to believe they were brothers at all. But they shared the same pale eyes, and the same appetite for killing.   
  
In the end, it wasn’t hard to pin the crime on the brothers. They had gathered enough evidence to prosecute them though they were still missing one key element: Mary, Mary Meno.   
  
They tracked the brothers, who they were certain didn’t know they suspected them, to a warehouse where they found that missing piece, bleeding and bruised and traumatized chained to a chair in the center of the largest room. Hostage rescue burst in with the agents of the BAU and took Mary out, and then the shooting began.   
  
Agent Morgan was shot in the chest. Agent Rossi was knocked unconscious when he dove out of the way of a bullet and directly into a wall; Agent Jareau was struck in the eye and Agent Prentiss sprained her knee. SSA Hotchner’s forearm was broken with a tire iron but, as Rossi and Morgan were taken to the hospital, he continued to fight with Agent Prentiss. The brothers had escaped, and they had taken Agent Reid in their flight.   
  
Time passed. As Agent Morgan lay on an operating table with his chest open and ribs spread, as he was moved into an ICU room and hooked to a million beeping machines, and finally as he lay in a ward for recovery and attended physical therapy, they looked for Spencer. They searched for all those days slipping all those weeks falling into all those months but they didn’t find him. They looked forever, but they didn’t. They didn’t.   
  
Agent Hotchner wrote, in his case file:  _We will not give up_.   
  
But, in the end, they were not given the chance. They were taken off the case.   
  
  
  
There was an empty desk in the BAU bullpen. Miranda wondered why it had never struck her as odd before.


	2. part two

She pushed the file away from herself, feeling slightly sick.  
  
It was strange, to read about that day, and those days after, all boiled down into twenty pages from each agent, some more, some less. Miranda could feel the pain they must be feeling, the guilt and recrimination, just wanting things to be right when they were wrong, for the past to get better, but they were still just plain, cold words. Agent Jareau’s report was the most emotional, Agent Morgan’s the shortest, SSA Rossi’s was laced with fatigue and bitterness and SSA Prentiss’s so filled with fury, and SSA Hotchner’s so clinical and detached. She wondered what that said about them, to each other. Probably a lot, but she couldn’t pick it out. She didn’t want to.  
  
She wondered if they still searched, still looked. She imagined SSA Hotchner in his office late at night, poring over police reports and files and documents, while the rest all sat at their desks in the bullpen, doing the same, worrying, waiting, hoping.  
  
Miranda checked her filing system, then stood up from her desk and went into the aisles of the archives, searching for other cases connected with Spencer Reid and this life he had led. She found a few, pulling them out and putting them into the crook of her arm, like she was on some sort of strange shopping trip, a shopping trip for information that she shouldn’t really be reading.  
  
She wasn’t supposed to read the files. Every once in a while, it was okay to open one up, just to double check that it was going to the right place, but to read one—to sit down and crack open file after file on one person because their picture had fallen out?  
  
She wasn’t supposed to do this.  
  
But her she was, now back at her desk, a stack of files by her elbow and the computer system on, sifting through search results in the hated electronic system for cases where Spencer Reid was the primary or highly involved. There were a number. She printed them all out.  
  
Miranda glanced at her printer tray; it seemed to be having some kind of fit, trying to print everything. She looked back to the files that she had gotten out of the archives and picked the one up on the top. She would go get lunch and read this file as she waited for the others to print.  
  
And she would get back to her work, and the other files to put away from the BAU and her work for Agent Ryan of the Cold Case Unit.  
  
But lunch first, and Spencer.  
  
She grabbed her valise, fishing her iPod out as she went, and rode the elevator up to the cafeteria.  
  
Miranda, the folder tight under her arm, put some food on her tray, paid for it all, and then weaved her way through all the agents and analysts with their lunches to her normal table, by herself, in an alcove near a window. She settled down, put on her head phones, and opened the folder to read as she ate.  
  
She had gotten her normal club sandwich, banana, and bottle of water, with a cookie—but she was so distracted with what was in the file that she barely registered that her banana was still green and she’d made a grab for oatmeal raisin, which she always maintained had no business being a cookie at all. But the file—that  _file_ , all about Spencer and his last case and those  _men_ —  
  
The file she had now was about Spencer’s first shooting. He was in a hostage situation, with SSA Hotchner and some madman with a sniper rifle who thought he was better than everyone else and no one realized it; and Spencer had to shoot the man, and he killed him. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but there were all of those people who he needed to protect. He had to.  
  
He was a prince, she thought. In the file about his first shooting and the last file that bore his name—he ventured out and tried to save people, to save the princess in each of the stories he lived. And he did save her, he did—it was just that he got captured too then, after freeing her. He freed her and became the captive of two horrible men, and the princess was left to wander outside the high, dark ivy covered walls of an evil castle, waiting to save her prince, her would-be love.  
  
She wanted to save Spencer. The thought sprang into her head, almost fully formed. She wanted to find him and rescue him.  
  
Miranda felt it in her with a strange conviction, a conviction that she would do this thing. She had never wanted to do something like this before. She had always thought that someday she would be the one who was rescued, ever since she was a little girl. A man would come and he would set her free from the life that she shouldn’t have been living but was anyway.  
  
She bit into her sandwich, chewing thoughtfully. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Miranda had to do the saving to get to where she needed to be.  
  
Or maybe she was getting caught up.  
  
How could she, a simple glorified librarian help someone like Spencer, when his own team of brilliant profilers hadn’t been able to?  
  
 _Pipe dream, Miranda,_  she thought. It sounded like her father’s voice.  
  
She tried to focus on her lunch but her eyes kept straying back to the file, and she thought, again, about how Spencer hadn’t wanted to be the hero but he was anyway.  
  
 _With great power comes great responsibility,_  Miranda thought. That one sounded like her brothers.  
  
Someone tapped her on her arm. She looked up.  
  
Toby, the Texan from Accounts Payable with the thick plastic glasses and messy hair, stood there smiling at her, a tray in his hands. He waited for her to acknowledge him with a nod before he sat down at the table. He always did that, waited for her permission for him to sit at the table with her, like it wasn’t a free cafeteria or something.  
  
He was puzzling to Miranda, more so than most people, especially because Toby  _always_  sat with her at lunch when she was there; even if she was doing something else, like she was doing now, he would still sit down and just eat in silence while she worked. She thought it was kind of odd, because he seemed, from what she could see, to be really good friends with the other accountants and they ate lunch at the same time as she did—they were even at a table.  _Like_ , thought Miranda,  _six feet away!_    
  
Miranda, who knew she was kind of weird, thought Toby might even be weirder.  
  
She pulled off her headphones, just to be polite, as he sat down.  
  
“What were you listening to?” he asked.  
  
“Iron & Wine,” she told him.  
  
“They’re cool,” he said.  
  
Miranda nodded and Toby smiled at her, taking a bite of his sandwich. She reached for her bottle of water. Toby got a club sandwich from the cafeteria too, and he would get a peach or a plum or a pear, whatever they had that day—no banana. He wasn’t a fan, he’d told her several times. He had a plum today. He drank an iced tea and always brought a candy bar from his home—Cadbury Fruit and Nut. He would offer her a piece, every time.  
  
She always said no. She wondered why he kept on asking.  
  
The agents of the BAU would probably know. They could read and understand people in a blink of an eye. For them, it was like opening up a book and skipping to the end; they could read that last page and just know. It was their job, after all. And they were so good at it, good at people.  
  
But, like she said—she didn’t really do people. She’d had one best—and only, really—friend her entire life; and, quite frankly, she was pretty much fine with that. So what if her mom always accused her of living in her head? Maybe she liked it there. She had her books, and her files, and her work, and she had Lily. Miranda wasn’t lonely.  
  
Did Toby think she was lonely? Is that why he always sat with her, because he pitied her?  
  
Miranda frowned at her sandwich and thought, resolutely,  _I’m not lonely_.  
  
She wasn’t.  
  
She had  _stuff_.  
  
And now even more, with Spencer’s files.  
  
She adjusted them were they were found out along her elbow, straightening them into a pile. She was going to do something about them, she decided. She would read them and she would find out—something, him, maybe. She would find him. The princess would save the prince.  
  
Miranda smiled to herself.  
  
Toby, sandwich half in his mouth, asked, “What are those?”  
  
Glancing down at the files, Miranda gave a little shrug. “They’re from my archives.”  
  
“Cool,” he said. “I didn’t know you got to read them.”  
  
“I do,” she said. There wasn’t, after all, anything expressly said in her handbook. “I got asked to.”  
  
“Really?” he said.  
  
Miranda nodded, sort of warming to the lie. She enjoyed being able to act like an agent, however pretend, to someone who did the same things as she did day in and day out. Though, his thing was numbers and hers was words and pages of files—but still. Kind of the same.  
  
“Yeah,” she said. “They want me to see if I can find any connections in any of the other files that I might have seen.”  
  
“Wow, seriously, that’s cool,” Toby told her, head bobbing up and down. “I just add bills and expenses all day. You get to do, like,  _work_.”  
  
“I guess,” she said.  
  
Toby grinned. Then, he finished his sandwich and reached for his Cadbury bar, holding it out. “Fruit and nut?”  
  
“No, thank you,” she said. She drank the last of her water, glancing down at Spencer’s files, at Spencer’s life on her lunch table. She cleaned up her mess on her tray and tucked the files under her arm. “I need to get back.”  
  
“Sure,” he said. “Hey, see you tomorrow.”  
  
Nodding again, Miranda left, throwing her trash away as she went. She took the stairs to the Sub-Basement and entered her archives. She put her things down on her desk and glanced at her printer. It sat on the filing cabinet in an especially accusatory manner, the green button indicating that there was a paper jam flashing. She quickly fixed it, noting thankfully that most of the files had already printed and it had given up in the last few, and the printer spit out the finally pages before going sullen silent.  
  
She glanced at the pages and raised her eyebrows on seeing that, while they had printed out and that was something to be grateful for, they were crooked. And the ink was nearly gone.  
  
Miranda straightened them and stacked them up, separating them out and stapling them. She slid them into her valise with the rest before turning to the files that she had been given that morning to put away. Miranda nodded to herself and set to work.  
  
Well, she tried to set to work.  
  
Honest.  
  
It was just—she tried to concentrate on filing away Agent Ryan’s files, and the rest of the boxes from the BAU, but her mind kept straying away from what she was doing, back to Spencer and the stories of his life with the FBI: his time in L.A., the mystery orchestrated by the man who had known his mother, the boy in black, and the girl held in the school bathroom. She thought about his strength in those times, and how strong he had to be now, held.  
  
Because of course he was still held. That had to be the middle part of the story that Miranda was coming in on. The brothers kept him too frightened to kill an agent of the government or maybe because he was something new for them to test, to toy with. But they did keep him. Miranda couldn’t conceive of anything else, of any other ending to this book.  
  
  
  
At the end of the day, at six thirty, when she had promised Lily she would leave for the apartment, Miranda had all of the BAU files put away but only half of Agent Ryan’s cold cases.  
  
And she had, in all honesty, taken out a few more of Spencer’s files to read. She liked his reports the best, the way he wrote; but SSA Hotchner’s were could too, and Agent Rossi’s—his were funny.  
  
She sighed to herself, frustrated. She should have gotten more done. She always did.  
  
But Spencer—  
  
Miranda shook her head, as if the motion would clear her thoughts out. She donned her jacket, scarf, and hat, grabbed her valise, heavy with the files about Spencer, and headed out of the building, to the nearest metro stop, walking through the bitter chill of what promised to be a vicious winter, even for D.C.. It was going to snow soon, the weathermen were saying, and you could see that written in the sky, dark and heavy clouds hanging low. A storm was coming in from the west, about to crash onto their streets and back up traffic.  
  
Miranda had grown up in Virginia, where, when it snowed, everyone freaked out. Even just an inch on the ground meant the apocalypse was nigh. Everyone in D.C. was the same.  
  
Once in the metro, she flashed her pass and went through the turnstiles, getting onto her correct train and finding an open seat—there was definitely something to be said for coming home at seven at night. No congestion in the cars. No one was even sitting across from her, which pleased her. She hated accidentally catching someone’s eye.  
  
She clutched her valise to her chest, arms tight around it, as if someone would try and rip Spencer and the files about him away from her. She wanted to hold the picture of him again; it made her fingers itch when she wasn’t.  
  
There was a glass window across from her. Outside it, the underground walls of D.C. sped past, dark grays and blues with the occasional flash of yellow from the lights, or maybe some red. It looked like a painting that had water splashed on it, all blurred and unfocused. It was peaceful here, beneath a city that was always so busy.  
  
The metro stopped and a woman sat down across from her. Miranda immediately glanced down, staring at her shoes and the grating beneath them. Someone had stepped in gum, smashing it down and staining the grating a pinkish color. It looked like blood.  
  
There were a million photos in the last file on Spencer, the one in which he disappeared for that last time. There was one of a blood splatter and they said it was his. Miranda wondered how it got there. What had then done to him? Had he been shot like Agent Morgan? Or had they just struck him across the face, splitting his lip open or maybe giving him a bloody nose?  
  
She looked up again and accidentally caught the eye of the woman across from her. She smiled. Miranda looked over her shoulder, out to the walls again.  
  
He’d been kidnapped before, Spencer. He had been with Agent Jareau, out at the house of the man they thought was behind a string of killings, and they had gone to the barn and split up. The man had struck Spencer on the head and he had taken him. He was with him for days and SSA Hotchner figured out where he was being held and they found him, that time.  
  
In the report he had written, Spencer had sounded sad. He had regretted what had happened, regretted the events that had unfolded and put them all in that situation.  
  
Spencer wrote,  _It shouldn’t have ended like that.  
  
I should have helped him,_ he said.  
  
In the file, it had seemed like Spencer thought it wasn’t the fault of the man who had kidnapped him. He hadn’t been right in the head and the man, Tobias, hadn’t really wanted to do that. He had been several different people and it was those people who had taken Spencer, not Tobias. Tobias had tried to protect Spencer from the beatings, from the father inside of his head, and Tobias had honestly cared about what was happening to Spencer. He didn’t want his father to be in his head. He had tried to end it.  
  
But you can’t argue with the voices inside, Miranda figured, and Tobias couldn’t get his father out. He hurt Spencer anyway and Spencer, who knew it wasn’t Tobias fault, who knew everything about what was happening, had been the one to end it.  
  
He shot Tobias.  
  
Maybe that was helping him enough. At least, that’s what SSA Hotchner had argued. He thought Spencer had done the right thing, that by killing Tobias, he had set him free from his father and the pain inside.  
  
Spencer didn’t seem to agree. His words ached, they  _ached_ , for Tobias and were laced with regret about what happened. Spencer hurt, and not just from his beatings. He didn’t think he did enough, he thought he could have done more, protected him saved him.  
  
The people inside Tobias had been making Spencer dig his own grave and still he wrote,  _It shouldn’t have ended like that._  
  
It shouldn’t have ended in that graveyard, with Spencer holding a gun by the grave he had dug and would have been buried in, and Tobias bleeding out on the ground. It should have had a different ending, where the father was alive and the one who was committing all the acts of evil. He shouldn’t have been in his son’s head.  
  
Tobias was innocent.  
  
Spencer wanted that known: the beatings, the pain, the death; it wasn’t Tobias.  
  
But it still ended the way it did.  
  
 _They must beat him regularly_ , Miranda thought, _the men who have him now. They must have to do it to subdue him, Spencer wouldn’t give up without a fight. He’s not like that._  
  
Because of course he would fight, fight all the time. He would want to get free, to get back to the people that care about him. And the prince, in the story, would never give up. He would never. It wasn’t how he was made.  
  
The carriage she was in shook and came to a halt, doors sliding open in a swift movement. She glanced up at the people leaving and saw the stop name. She sighed to herself and gathered her things to her chest, jumping up and leaving too; she was one stop past her own, which wasn’t all that unusual, if Miranda was honest with herself. She missed her stop fairly often, enough that she suspected the ticket agents recognized her when she jumped into the right line, flashing her pass and smiling sheepishly at the floor.  
  
She was old hand at back-tracking to her stop, no matter how many stops she had missed, and so it only took her a few minutes to get onto the correct line and make her way home. And even though she was just going one stop, she sat upright and alert the whole time, her iPod turned down low.  
  
In minutes, she was off the train and making her way to the surface, through the made crush of people going home to Logan Circle.  
  
Outside of the stop, a fine layer of late November snow had fallen. Miranda walked carefully down the streets to her apartment building, pulling her hat down over the tops of her rapidly chilling ears. She thought of where Spencer might be, in this weather, in this cold.  
  
Her building wasn’t that long of a walk from the metro stop, which Miranda was thankful for every hot summer day, rainy spring night, and snowy winter evening, so she was there in good time. There was a brief struggle between her hands and her purse for her keys at the entrance of her building, but she prevailed and keyed her way in. She dropped them into her coat and jogged lightly up four flights of stairs—the super needed to fix the elevator, again—snow dislodging with each step, leaving glassy little puddles in her wake, like mirrors of the ceiling.  
  
She passed three doors before stopping at her own and pulling her keys out of her pocket, unlocking her door.  
  
Inside, Lily was sitting on the floor, fingers dark with charcoal.  
  
She was working on her newest commission, Miranda could see, the one she was doing for the underground coffee house by K Street. It was a beautiful woman, scaling a castle wall covered in ivy with her back to them. There was a tree behind the wall, growing high up into the sky, and the woman was reaching up into the tree for something. Whatever it was, Lily had drawn anything in yet; she hadn’t yet decided what it would be.  
  
Lily always said that was how the best art came to her: she waited and then it would arrive, maybe when she was sleeping, maybe when she was eating, maybe when she was in the bath. Eventually, the inspiration would come to her and she would draw it.  
  
Miranda didn’t like that. She liked clear cut endings. She liked to know.  
  
“Hi,” said Miranda. Lily held up a finger, drawing quickly with her other hand. Miranda hung up her coat and scarf, took off her hat, and sat down on the coffee table that Lily had moved out of the center of the room, to the edges, to work. She kept her valise on her lap as she waited there.  
  
After a moment, Lily put her pencils down and raised her head, her bleach blonde ringlets riotous around her perfect face.  
  
There was pretty, there was gorgeous, and then there was totally unbelievably beautiful. Lily was unbelievably beautiful; she could have modeled and made millions of dollars and she didn’t even know how pretty she was, and Miranda, who knew she was plain and normal, probably wouldn’t have been friends her if Lily hadn’t been totally messed up too. When she was a teenager, her father embezzled a lot of money and got sent to jail, his exploits thrown across newspaper after newspaper, and Lily responded by developing a meth habit that landed her in rehab when she was seventeen. Her mother then marked the occasion by killing herself three weeks later.  
  
Miranda met Lily her first day of college. Miranda was moving into her third floor freshman dorm, her brothers behind her with boxes in their arms, and there was Lily in the room, all ready lying on a bed and settled in. She had posters all over her side of the room: one from an exhibit at the Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Florida; copies of Degas and Rothko and Lautrec and Pollock; a picture of a Rodin statue; concert posters; and, on the ceiling, the Sistine Chapel was printed onto many sheets, pasted on the ceiling until it became the painting once more.  
  
Lily, with her beauty and her artistic skill and tragedy tattooed into her dark eyes, had quite simply terrified plain and quiet Miranda. After leaving rehab, Lily replaced her drugs with sex and cigarettes, going to parties and coming back to the apartment wrecked—but, this time, it was her own doing. She was in control, and Miranda figured that had to mean something huge to her, after she puzzled out what had made Lily the stoic, beautiful mess she was.   
  
But quiet, sweet Miranda helped to tame Lily. They slowly inched towards friendship and Miranda began to get her to stay in Fridays and watch movies with her; they liked the same things, it turned out—fantasy films, with endings both sad and happy. Miranda would pick up Lily from frat parties, when she would call her crying and stoned to take her home.  
  
Time eased some of Lily’s impossible pain. She grew less bold and, though Miranda wished she would have taken some of it, she stayed the same. She gained Lily, though, so she imagined that had to count for something.  
  
Halfway through their sophomore year, Lily dropped out and got an apartment in D.C. Miranda stayed in school but moved in with her. Lily painted and drew for her rent, and Miranda took out a loan and used the money she got working at the campus library. And they stayed together, in that apartment, even after Miranda graduated.  
  
Sometimes, Miranda wondered if they were both scared of growing up, of leaving the only comfort they both had known in such a long age.  
  
Miranda liked it where she was, with Lily in their small apartment in the building where the elevator never worked. She knew it, and she knew Lily. They were best friends, despite Miranda being the opposite of everything that Lily had ever once been and maybe still kept locked away inside her.   
  
“Good day?” asked Lily.  
  
Nodding, Miranda stood from her perch on the coffee table. “You?”  
  
Lily waved a hand at her drawing and leaned back. “It’s coming along.”  
  
“It’s nice,” said Miranda.  
  
“Yeah,” said Lily. She scrunched up her nose. “They need faces though. Eyes.”  
  
Miranda nodded again and began to wander into the kitchen, taking her valise with her. Behind her, she could hear Lily rising too and following Miranda in her search for something to drink. She rummaged in the fridge for a moment and Lily’s quiet step echoed on the tiles of the kitchen floor.  
  
“You’re late, though,” said Lily.  
  
“I missed the stop,” Miranda muttered, hoping Lily wouldn’t hear her.  
  
But Lily had ears like a freaking bat and she said, “That’s the fourth time this month, Manda! Do I need to come pick you up at your building and make sure you get home to the apartment all right every night?”  
  
“I’m not a kid,” she said, sitting down at the table.  
  
“The juice box begs to differ,” Lily said.  
  
Miranda wrapped her fingers tightly around said juice box and frowned. “Shut up.”  
  
Lily shot her a half-smile, which was as big as Miranda ever really saw her mouth get. Lily wasn’t a smiler. Sometimes her eyes lit up and the corners of her lips cracked but you never saw teeth. Miranda privately thought that Lily had never smiled before she met Miranda, because Lily had undoubtedly grown up sad. She didn’t have laugh lines, which supported the theory, and Miranda thought Lily’s cheeks would break if she even attempted one.  
  
Lily had been bold, had made people want her frozen mouth, and she had been beautiful and stoic, and maybe now she was inching towards being okay. But that didn’t mean a smile would ever be written properly across her mouth. She had never learned.  
  
Miranda thought of SSA Hotchner, who had laugh lines, like he had smiled once but had forgotten how.  
  
“What are we have for dinner?” asked Lily, sitting down at the table across from Miranda and putting her sketch book on the table. She rested her arms across it, staring. “It’s your turn.”  
  
“I know,” said Miranda, toying with the latch on her valise, opening and closing it. “You want sandwiches and salad, or, like, soup or something?”  
  
“Defrost the borscht Steve sent us,” suggested Lily.  
  
Miranda nodded. Steve was her second brother and the best cook of them all, and he was a chef now in a little Eastern European place in New York City.  
  
“And I’ll roast some potatoes,” Miranda said.  
  
Lily nodded too. “That sounds good. What are those?”  
  
Miranda glanced at her. She was pointing at the valise, so Miranda looked down again and saw that she had pulled some files out.  
  
“Nothing,” she said, pushing them back in. She pushed the flap over, but didn’t close the latch. She thought about it but didn’t. She thought of Spencer and winter, of her heated apartment and dinner and everything else. She blinked. “It’s nothing.”  
  
Lily’s eyebrows went up.  
  
“Really,” said Miranda, standing up from the table. “Shut up. They’re files from work.”  
  
“I didn’t say a thing,” said Lily. “And you never bring files home.”  
  
“Tonight I did,” she said. “It’s nothing important.”  
  
“Oh, you are a terrible liar, Miranda Jones,” Lily said, sighing and leaning back in her chair.  
  
“Shut up, Lily Flanigan,” said Miranda but not angrily. Miranda really didn’t do anger. She liked quiet things. She turned her back to her and went to the freezer, pulling out the borscht and putting it into the microwave, setting it.  
  
Then, she began to make the rest of the dinner, shuffling around the kitchen and pulling down pots and pans for the potatoes, while Lily opened up her sketch book and started to draw. They were quite in the kitchen, just the sound of Miranda dropping things into a bowl and the soft scratch of pencil on paper, and then Lily put down her pencil.  
  
It took a moment for it to register in Miranda’s mind, the wooden noise of the pencil hitting the glass table top, and when it did, she turned round. Lily was pawing inside Miranda’s valise and she had a few files all ready out. Miranda dropped a spoon.  
  
Lily looked shifty. “I couldn’t help it. What  _are_  these?”  
  
Miranda shot forward to grab the files but Lily, who had always been freakishly quick at things like this and was blessed with long limbs, yanked the files she had freed back, the legs of her chair scraping shrilly.  
  
“Give it back,” said Miranda.  
  
“No,” said the other young woman, “not until you tell me—”  
  
They were at a stand off, on opposite sides of the table but Miranda managed to throw one hand out and grab the edge of the files over it. The pair tugged briefly at it before Miranda managed to free them from Lily’s grasp, holding it tightly to her chest. She snatched up her valise too. She stared at Lily, waiting for her to explain herself.  
  
But she wasn’t staring back. She was looking at the table and at the picture that had fallen out on it.  
  
Spencer.  
  
Miranda made to grab it but Lily was there first, with the long reach of her arm. She held the picture at the corner with two fingertips and Miranda continued to stare. Her own fingers itched, more and more the longer Lily held onto the picture.  
  
After what felt like forever, Lily declared, “I like his face,” and held the photo out.  
  
“It’s a good face,” agreed Miranda quietly, taking it.  
  
“Who is he?” she asked, sitting back down at the table, pulling her open sketch book towards herself. Miranda shifted on her feet, one arm still tight around her valise and files, the other hand on the photo.  
  
“Spencer,” she said. She slowly sat. “He’s a BAU agent.”  
  
“I thought you said there were only six of them,” Lily said, eyebrows drawn as she drew something new—an eye and a cheekbone.  
  
“He was kidnapped,” Miranda told her. She put the photo on the table and pushed it around with one finger. “They miss him.”  
  
Lily looked up, curious. Miranda knew Lily didn’t really understand why people missed other people, or why they cared. Miranda thought Lily knew that Miranda cared about her but you could never be sure with Lily. Her family had really screwed her up.  
  
“Really?” asked Lily.  
  
“They keep his desk empty,” she replied. “If he comes back.”  
  
“How do you know that?” Lily looked back at her sketch, editing something, and then up again.  
  
“That has to be the reason,” Miranda said. “What else could it be?”  
  
Lily looked skeptical but didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she asked, “Why do you have them?”  
  
“I found them?” tried Miranda, but her voice raised awkwardly at the end and Lily continued to look skeptical. Eventually, Miranda cracked, because she had never really been able to keep anything from Lily. They knew each other too well. “I was filing, okay, and his picture fell out.”  
  
“And so you took a bunch of files home,” added Lily.  
  
“I wanted to know about him,” Miranda said, standing up and going to the stove. She turned the front burner on and put a pot filled with water on it. She stared at it. “I—it’s just, he’s trapped, you know? In a castle somewhere and he should be free.”  
  
Lily said nothing, so Miranda continued, “I’d like to save him, I guess. I read all about him and I think—I think we could be friends.”  
  
“But he’s missing,” she said.  
  
“I know that,” said Miranda, watching as a few bubbles started to appear on the bottom of the pot. “I’d like to save him, remember?”  
  
“Yeah,” said Lily.  
  
“They are people who want him, Lily,” she told her, very quietly. “They never gave up on him and they want him back. They deserve something.”  
  
“And you think you could be the one to give it to them,” Lily said.  
  
Miranda shrugged one shoulder. “Yes. Happy endings, Lily.”  
  
“Sure,” she said. Lily went back to her sketching and so Miranda went to the pot, which was now boiling in earnest. She dropped the potatoes she had gotten from the fridge into the water and then stirred the borscht in the microwave a bit.  
  
Spencer’s desk was empty because they wanted him to come back to it. Miranda wanted him to come back to it too. She liked Spencer and she thought that they’d be good friends, because Miranda wanted him too.  
  
She glanced at Lily’s sketchbook, where she was doodling unconsciously. She had started to draw Spencer.  
  
Miranda bit her lip and looked at the potatoes in water, waiting. She completed the meal in silence and, when it was nearly ready, Lily closed her book and set the table. They ate in near silence too, awkward from their sort-of fight.  
  
“Could I read some of it?” asked Lily, halfway through her borscht.  
  
“Some of what?” asked Miranda.  
  
Lily made a face. “One of the files on your Spencer.”  
  
Miranda made a noise like a dying animal and Lily rolled her eyes so hard Miranda thought maybe she was going to do permanent damage to herself. “Oh, please, you basically stole them from the archives. I know you’re not supposed to read them.”  
  
“It’s kind of vague on the subject,” she hedged.  
  
“Manda,” said Lily. They stared at each other. After a moment, Miranda sighed.  
  
“Just a little bit,” she said. “After dinner.”  
  
Lily ate very quickly after that. Miranda ate very slowly.  
  
After they were finished, they washed the dishes together and went into the living room. Lily sat on the couch and Miranda reluctantly handed her a file, everything in her screaming to  _stop stop stop_  because this was  _so_  going to get her fired or something.  
  
Miranda really didn’t want to lose her job; she loved her job, certain things not withstanding, but Lily had asked and Miranda knew she would probably tell her everything anyway. And, somewhere down the line in Miranda’s version of this story, she imagined Lily would come in handy.  
  
She gave her the file about the train, because it showed how brave Spencer was, and good, and how he cared about his team and they cared about him back.  
  
Lily curled up with it and began to read.  
  
“I’m just going to go to bed then,” said Miranda. It was early but she was exhausted from her day. Lily waved a hand and Miranda walked from the living room to their small bathroom, where she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She went to her bedroom to change into her pajamas and climbed into her bed, curling under her many blankets.  
  
It took her a while to fall asleep that night.  
  
When she did, she dreamt of Spencer.  
  
  
  
From SSA Hotchner’s personal report:  
  
 _“I have Trpkova on this roof,” said Torre, finger pressed firmly into a point on the map, “and Stewart from Lima Group on this one. They have the best vantage points of the city there, from our discussions with local SWAT.”  
  
I nodded. “But do they see anything?”  
  
Torre’s jaw tightened. “No. They—they don’t, Aaron. No one has seen anything. I’m sorry.”  
  
“Don’t say you’re sorry,” I told him. “We’ll do this.”  
  
“Yeah,” he said. He sounded like he meant it.  
  
I trusted, I do trust, Torre to do this with me. He knows, better than anyone. He was at Waco, and Ruby Ridge, and we wrote the book on hostage negotiation together. He was a brilliant strategist and equally empathetic. He knew what he was doing.  
  
“How do you feel about the Marshal Service?” asked Torre after a moment. “You know, they’re the best at finding people in the business.”  
  
“I know,” I said.  
  
He traced his fingers along the map for a moment, and then asked, “Have you ever worked with Ortega’s crazies?”  
  
Again, I nodded. Beathan Ortega’s two Marshals, King and Underhill, and their tech squad, were regarded as one of the best teams of fugitive finders in the country. They never gave up. I wouldn’t give up.  
  
“I’ll call them,” said Torre.  
  
“If they have him,” I said, slowly, “and we go in.”  
  
“Generally, that’s what we do,” he said, with a wry smile that didn’t meet his eyes.  
  
“But if the room is tight,” I continued. “What’s the minimal loss in that situation?”  
  
He said nothing.  
  
You know, I knew Dan Torre from back when we were in FBI training. Because, more importantly than any of these other things about him, he was a good man, who never left people behind. He didn’t know how to give up; and there again, in my mind, was Spencer_  
  
  
  
Spencer  
  
  
Spencer  
  
  
Where did they take you?  
  
  
  
Miranda woke with his face in her eyes and his voice in her ears: find me, save me.  
  
It was like that for a while.


	3. part three

One morning, in middle December, Miranda rolled out of bed, trying to run her hands through her still braided hair and getting them tangled. She made a frustrated noise and gave up, pulling at the hair ties while she wandered into the bathroom to shower.  
  
It was six a.m. and Miranda was basically on auto-pilot, like every morning. She wasn’t great at anything that side of eleven a.m.; she blamed college.  
  
She got showered and dressed, braiding her hair back into two and twisting them into small knobs at the base of her skull. She ate toast and jam and tried not to be jealous of Lily, who, being self-employed, tended to sleep and wake whenever it suited her and was currently still asleep in her bedroom.  
  
Miranda gathered her things for work, collecting the files of Spencer’s that she had spread around, and put her jacket on. She carefully stepped over Lily’s drawing as she tied her scarf, looking down at the still unfinished piece, with the mystery woman reaching for something unknown. She left her apartment and walked to the metro stop, riding it back the way she had come the night before, back to the FBI building.  
  
In her carriage, with her head back against the window and her eyes struggling to stay open, she imagined a dark and evil sorcerer, with his equally evil apprentice. They lived in a black castle on a high hill, in woods, and they would take young women from the surrounding villages for their evil purposes, leaving their innocent bones piled up beneath their gates every few days.  
  
One day, a prince and his band of knights rode against the castle, to stop the needless slaughter of those young women. There was a great battle: the knights were wounded and the prince was taken by the sorcerer to parts unknown. The black castle was left empty and splashed with blood. The knights, when they were able to regain their strength, searched long and hard for their prince; but, ultimately, they were unable to succeed and the ruler of their land ordered them to drop the search and return to helping others, as they had been.  
  
But, in the court of the king and the knights, a young maid lived. She wore her hair in braids and was thought lowly of by many in the court. One day, just like the one day when the prince set out, the maid went out to the black and bloody castle. She went inside, past the gates made of bones, and into its depths and, there, she discovered that the sorcerer and his apprentice had been living their, secretly, for years, with the prince as their captive. Using only her wits, and with another maid who was the first closest and truest friend and who never smiled, the maid saved the prince.  
  
At the end of it all, when he was restored to his kingdom and his knights wept with joy at his return, the prince held the maid’s hand and he said, “Thank you, thank you for saving me. My dear—”  
  
The carriage shuddered to a halt and Miranda stood, exiting to the platform and walking out of the metro. At the FBI building, she flashed her ID, blinking blearily at the guards, and rode down to Sub-Basement Three and Archives Four, where she just wanted to lay her head on her desk and sleep for a few more hours.  
  
Miranda sighed, sitting down at her desk and booting up her computer. She checked her work e-mail and decided to go back to work on the cold case files from nice Agent Ryan, because she had neglected them so yesterday. It was seven thirty and it took her until ten to get them away. She focused hard and tried not to think of Spencer, wherever he was.  
  
When she was done, she went back to her computer to update a few things. She absently opened up a window to go through the electronic archives for any more files on Spencer. She did a huge search as she half worked on other things and, when it was done, a number of results under a few different law enforcement branches had cropped up.  
  
She blinked, staring at them, and tried to decide which ones were going to be best. Eventually, she decided on the U.S. Marshal Service, because they were in the business of catching fugitives and she figured that was exactly what the brothers were. She clicked on the link and was disappointed when nothing happened. She tried again, and then again. A message window popped up, telling her she didn’t have access to an of the Marshal files from this computer.  
  
Miranda fought the urge to hit her head on her desk and tried to think of a way that could get her into the files. After a moment, she thought: Miss Garcia. She could get her in, mainly because Miss Garcia could get into anything, no matter if she was allowed to or not.  
  
Miranda stood from her desk and walked to the elevator, riding up to level seven, to the BAU, and walked quietly, with her head down, to Miss Garcia’s small office.  
  
She knocked on the door.  
  
“It’s open!” called Miss Garcia. Miranda entered quietly, shutting the door behind her. Miss Garcia turned her chair to see who entered. She was dressed in blues to match the winter, colored like a painting of a frozen lake and a blue, blue sky. She’d even put streaks of blue in her hair and wore her green glasses.  
  
“My little librarian,” said Miss Garcia with a wide, toothy smile. Miranda smiled shyly back; whenever Miss Garcia called her a librarian, it didn’t sound so mean. It sounded kind of nice, really. “Here for my stunning good looks and shiny personality, or yucky business? Or both?”  
  
“Both,” said Miranda, which made Miss Garcia laugh.  
  
“What do you need?” she asked.  
  
Miranda shuffled her feet, staring at the floor. “Can you get into the U.S. Marshal Service Archives?”  
  
Miss Garcia’s eyes narrowed a little. “Why?”  
  
She thought quickly. She didn’t want to lie, but…  
  
“I think I have one of their files,” she said, eventually.   
  
“Don’t the files usually say?” asked Miss Garcia, twirling her sparkly pen in her fingers.  
  
“It doesn’t really indicate. I was going to check the filing system from their online archives,” Miranda said.  
  
“I’ll see what I can do for you,” said Miss Garcia. One of her machines beeped and she spun around, grinning. “Now, scram, my lovely librarian, I’ve got some work.”  
  
“Thanks,” said Miranda, quietly, and left.  
  
In the elevator, Miranda felt badly for lying to Miss Garcia but it was for a good cause. In the end, it would all work out and if Miss Garcia ever found out, she’d see. She’d know it was for the best.  
  
Once back in her archives, Miranda sighed to herself and decided she was hungry, She grabbed her things and went back to the elevator, riding up to the cafeteria and gathering her food. Toby sat with her again. They didn’t really talk, though Toby tried. Miranda read the boy in black file again.  
  
  
  
A week later next morning, there was a bright pink Post-It on her desk. In green pen, Miss Garcia had written a long series of numbers and letters and then,  _Here’s those files._  
  
Miranda did a little victory shimmy and slid into the chair behind her desk, quickly shedding her outdoor clothes as she went. She signed into her computer and then clicked through the system to get to the online Marshal Service Archives, which was messy as anything, but Miranda didn’t even have the heart to critique it when it meant she could read the files.  
  
She entered the numbers that Miss Garcia had given her—a pass code into everything, which she still couldn’t believe she had gotten, just because she had said she thought she might have one of their old files on accident—and started her search.  
  
The first file was a quick and dirty write-up, and then attached were two files from the two Marshals who went into the field and then one from the Marshal-in-Charge. There were a ton of pictures attached—she clicked through them all, taking in more crime scene photos and photos of places that the Marshals had looked and photos of the Marshals themselves.  
  
She wasn’t sure how any of the information would be helpful but she knew all the agents of the BAU were constantly reading files from other law enforcement when they were on a new case. She imagined they took everything in, even though they weren’t sure how it would be helpful either, and then, one moment, maybe days later, something would click. All the information would rush together and everything about the case would make sense.  
  
With that in mind, she decided to read a few more files from the Marshal team assigned to Spencer’s case—well, the brothers who took Spencer, they were the wanted fugitives—and she clicked through to read them.  
  
Before she knew it, an hour had passed and she became aware of a new box of files for her to put away. She exited the Marshal Service Archives and, sighing, got to work on them.  
  
She pulled a few out of the box, glancing at their number designations and began to make her way into the appropriate aisle. When the ones she had grabbed were put away, she went back for more.  
  
Bent over the box of files—from homicide—Miranda heard her doors swish open and the sharp tap of leather-soled shoes against the tile floors.  
  
Miranda straightened up and found herself face to face—well, face to five o’clock shadow—with a U.S. Marshal. Marshal Beatty Ortega, to be precise. She recognized him from his photograph: his ears were strangely pointy. She wondered, rather frantically, what he was doing there.  
  
“Hey,” he said, throwing Miranda out of her mild panic for a moment. His voice was so laidback, Miranda thought someone could probably carpet it.  
  
She blinked.  
  
“I’m Marshal Beatty Ortega,” he said. She blinked again and he continued, “One of my tech guys said someone had one of our open fugitive files open down here?”  
  
Her mouth opened. And Miranda wanted to say something, really she did, but nothing was coming out.  
  
“We have them flagged,” he said, like he didn’t notice Miranda’s mouth open wide. “It’s a paranoid if useful practice Ezra picked up from one of his fellow hackers, one who works here, actually.”  
  
 _Miss Garcia_ , Miranda’s mind supplied. “Miss Garcia,” she said aloud.  
  
“So you do speak,” said Ortega, smiling. “I have two daughters, eight and five, and agents, older but who act the same, and I’ve found that if I just keep talking, I can usually startle them into a response.  
  
Miranda’s mouth opened and shut.   
  
He smiled wider. “Yeah,” he said. “Anyway, the files? The Francis brothers?”  
  
“It’s tied to one of our files,” she told him, before she even knew she was talking again. The lie was awkward in her mouth, like trying to talk with marbles in there. “I was filing.”  
  
Ortega’s face, as laidback and sweet as his voice, clouded. “The Reid case,” he sighed. “Christ, that was a clusterfuck. Do they still have it open?”  
  
She nodded. Technically, it  _was_  closed, but Miranda had it opened. That counted, right?  
  
“Christ,” Ortega said again. He ran a hand across his face and sat down on the edge of her desk. “We’re still looking for those bastards, you know? Keep evading capture and, you know, not to brag or anything, but my Marshals are damn good at finding people.”  
  
“I read,” she said with a little smile to Ortega’s shiny wingtips.  
  
He made a sound like a laugh but it sounded choked. “Thanks. It’s just these guys. Do you mind if I vent, by the way?” She shrugged, but he didn’t seem to notice, just continuing on. “These guys killed more than,  _more than_ , eight young women and took a goddamn FBI agent, a profiler, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve disappeared. For two years, we’ve looked for these guys. Towns, all over the country. In those first few months, we were practically everywhere, you know? We basically lived in that mechanics’ the brothers worked in.”  
  
It was true, Miranda remembered. She had read the files. Hundreds of U.S. Marshals in Fugitive Capture had been mobilized, shutting down roads and checking everything in D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and the Tri-State Area. They had gone down south into the Carolinas and as far west as Illinois but there was nothing.  
  
Ortega and his team, who were truly amazing from what Miranda had discovered, had practically made it their personal mission to find the Francis brothers. They searched for months with a bloody-mindedness that made it seem like they, just like the BAU, were on a vendetta for those men. They had sworn to find them and bring them to justice. But they didn’t, just like the BAU. At least they got to keep their case file open though. That had to count for something.  
  
“How could they disappear,” said Ortega, almost to himself. “We looked in their hometown, in the towns of the murdered women, their houses, Georgia Mason’s home is still empty, places where the women intersected—that graveyard—near the interstate where they buried the bodies, anywhere that held any sort of meaning.”  
  
He looked up, eyes wild, and Miranda stared. Ortega blinked then, like he was realizing he wasn’t alone.  
  
“Sorry,” he said, voice calm once more. “They say the Marshals get their man, right?”  
  
“You will,” she said.  
  
Ortega smiled at the strange conviction in her tone and he stood from the desk. “Thanks. So, file just open because you were filing some stuff?”  
  
She nodded, unwilling to lie him again.  
  
“Well then,” he said. “I have to get back to the meeting that brought me here and you should get back to your work. Thank you for letting me vent, Miss,” he glanced at her desk for a placard but, when none was forthcoming, he just smiled, saying, “Miss.”  
  
Miranda nodded again.  
  
Marshal Ortega turned and walked out of Archives Four, his gait sharp and somewhat stiff. As he past through the doors, Miranda suddenly became aware of two others darkening her door: Agents Morgan and Rossi. They nodded to Ortega, exchanging pleasantries but, Miranda noticed with a growing sense of dread, they did not look happy. She wondered how long, exactly, they had been there. She guessed for a while.  
  
After a moment, Agent Morgan entered, his steps slow and steady.  
  
“You know Beatty?” he asked.  
  
Miranda stayed silent.  
  
“You don’t,” said Agent Rossi, from the doorway.   
  
Miranda nodded.  
  
“Why was he here?” asked Agent Morgan.  
  
“Oh, you know, Derek,” snapped Agent Rossi, entering. Miranda shrank back a little and Agent Morgan said, “Rossi.”  
  
“No,” he said. “No. You’ve been digging into things that don’t concern you.”  
  
She bit her lip.  
  
“You need to stop,” Agent Rossi told her. “Stop this. This isn’t—this isn’t a game, for us, like it clearly is for you. Is this just some adventure for you? Something to do? Answer me.”  
  
Miranda wanted to tell him she didn’t think this was a game. It wasn’t an adventure. It was Spencer, she understood. It was Spencer.  
  
“Rossi,” said Agent Morgan again..  
  
“I like you, Miranda, I really do,” said Agent Rossi, even though his eyes were blank and his voice flat with fury. “But my affection for you won’t keep me from my anger. This is a family matter, and you aren’t family. Step away from this, now.”  
  
He turned sharply on his heel and left. Miranda stared at her shoes, at the floor—anywhere but Agent Rossi’s retreating back.  
  
“He’s right,” said Agent Morgan, softly but firmly. “We like you, Miss Jones, but this is none of your business. Forget about it, okay?”  
  
Agent Morgan ducked his head, trying to get her to look at his eyes. She just nodded.  
  
She never looked people in the eye. Why start now?  
  
After Miranda nodded, Agent Morgan left and she sat at her table, alone, her fingers curled around the edge, pressed so tight the knuckles had gone white. She would do as they asked, or told her. It wasn’t any of her business. She was just the person who filed it all away; they were the ones who got to remember him, to ache for him, not her.  
  
Miranda went back to work, taking the stairs instead of the elevator back to her sub-basement. Inside the archives so dark, Miranda sat at her desk, putting her head down on it for a moment, trying to breathe.  
  
Eventually, she sat back up and looked around her. There were files strewn all over her desk, and requests, and she had so much work to do that had piled up during her mad frenzy to learn all she could about Spencer and his life. She started to organize.  
  
Two hours later, her desk was clear but for the requests. She sat down and started to prioritize them, preparing to get them ready. There were three from the homicide guys, and one from cold case, and a few from cyber crime, and on from Agent Jareau.  
  
She blinked, staring at the small slip of pink paper. She set it off to the far side of her desk. She would get that one ready last.  
  
Another hour passed as she put the files requested together, walking down the aisles in search and then paper-clipping the correct request form to the correct file when it was found. She put them all in a box, Agent Jareau’s file on the bottom, and set about delivering them to the proper department. After she made the rounds through the upper floors where homicide and cold case ere, she rode the elevator down to cyber crimes and put all their requested files on the right desks, checking their name plates so she wouldn’t make a mistake.  
  
Then she got back in the elevator, breaking down the cardboard box she had put the files in and throwing it into the trash beside it. She pressed seven and tucked Agent Jareau’s files under her arm as she went up.  
  
She stepped quietly into the bullpen of the BAU when the elevator halted. Miranda was always quiet, even though she figured that, at this late at night—she checked her watch briefly; it was nearly ten—that no one else would be around.  
  
She was surprised to see that she was wrong—though, maybe not all that surprised, considering.  
  
The light in SSA Hotchner’s office was on, slates of bright yellow behind the closed shades. Miranda quickly went to Agent Jareau’s office, laid the files she’d requested on her desk, and ran to the BAU’s break room. The coffee pot had congealed brown sludge on the bottom, so she washed it, made another, and went home.  
  
  
  
A week later, Miranda was happily rearranging some files, preparing to put a few new ones in. The cabinet that she had been using for that section was getting far too messy; it was in an unconscionable state, really, and Miranda was embarrassed whenever someone needed to get something out of it. So when she got word that some files were coming to her that would need to get put in that cabinet, she had readily decided to fix it all up.  
  
She frowned suddenly, pulling out a file. It wasn’t an FBI file. Miranda glanced at the cover, seeing that it was from the Maryland State Police, and she wondered how it had made its way into Archives Four.  
  
And how she had missed it.  
  
Miranda frowned again. She  _never_  missed things.  
  
She opened the file, wracked with curiosity, and gasped.  
  
It was one of the files on the kidnapping of Spencer Reid, from the local LEOs. It must have gotten sent down into the archives by mistake and Miranda must have been daydreaming when she put it away, she figured.  
  
 _Or_ , she thought and then shook her head.  
  
It was wishful, and stupid, to think that maybe the file had been put there for a reason—that it had been put there for her to stumble across, to give her a taste of what she had been missing, this thing she felt for Spencer and his ghost that echoed in the halls of the BAU with every breath they took in there.  
  
But it didn’t change the fact that it was there, that it was right there, waiting to be found, just like him.  
  
Miranda gripped the file tightly until she realized that she was crushing the pages. She stopped, and dropped it to the floor. She stared at it.  
  
What did this mean?  
  
After a moment, she bent down and picked it up, carrying it back to her desk, where she laid it down. She sat down too, propping her elbow up on her desk and resting her chin in her hand, still staring at the mysterious file. Just looking at it made her fingers itch.  
  
She sighed and glanced at her computer.  
  
 _This must be what it feels like to fall off the wagon,_  she thought and then grimaced.  
  
But she reached out for her keyboard anyway.  
  
A few clicks later and she was in the electronic database, searching again. She felt like a thief and like an old friend coming home at the same time.  
  
Opening up one of Spencer’s old files, she started to read again. In this one, Gideon was still around, and Elle, and Spencer was bravely entering a train, using a magic trick to try and convince a schizophrenic that he had pulled a chip out of his arm. Elle was on the train and the man had a gun. Spencer was coming to her rescue, and to the rescue of all the other people on the train.  
  
A message window suddenly popped up on her screen, automatically closing the file she had been reading.  
  


 _penelope.garcia:_  what are you doing? _  
_

  
Miranda might have thrown up in her mouth a little.  
  


 _miranda.jones:_  nothing  
 _penelope.garcia:_  you’re reading his files again, aren’t you?  
 _miranda.jones:_  no  
 _penelope.garcia:_  don’t lie.  
 _miranda.jones:_  I’m not  
 _penelope.garcia:_  miranda

  
There was a long moment when nothing happened and Miranda got caught up in the hysterical belief that everything would be all right.  
  


 _penelope.garcia:_ don’t go anywhere  
 _penelope.garcia:_  i'm coming down

  
The window shut.  
  
This time, Miranda really threw up in her mouth.  
  
She closed out of the file she had been reading, sending it away, and then set her head down on her desk. This was not going to be good; she could feel it in her bones.  
  
Minutes passed and nothing happened. The archives stayed quiet and there was no noise from the hall, and Miranda kept her head pressed into the cool metal surface of her desk, trying to stop her stomach from rolling. It wasn’t working. She felt so ill. She wanted to curl up and die.  
  
Out in the hall, the elevator dinged. Miranda sat up so fast her head swam and her vision blacked out for a moment.  
  
When she came to, Garcia was standing in her doorway. She was wearing a bright yellow sundress today with an equally bright pink sweater and sunflowers in her hair, looking like a sunbeam come to life in the dark of the archives in winter. Her glasses were red and horn-rimmed and she was not smiling. They stared at each other.  
  
“How’d you know?” asked Miranda, her voice tight in the quiet. It was a stupid question, because of course Miranda knew how Garcia knew, but at least it was something to say.  
  
“I flag their files,” she told her. “I know when people open them up.”  
  
Miranda looked at the floor.  
  
Garcia sighed. “Miranda, I like you, but you can’t do this.”  
  
 _Agents Rossi and Morgan,_  Miranda thought as she stared at the tops of her shoes. They needed polished.  
  
“I know it’s hard,” Garcia was saying, “but you can’t keep doing this. You can’t live in the past, you have to live in the now.”  
  
She wanted to ask,  _Then why do you keep his desk?_  But she didn’t.  
  
“I know, Miranda,” said Garcia. “I know what it’s like to get caught up and to want to help people. I know that’s just what you want to do, but it doesn’t always work out like that. People get hurt. I—I got hurt, Miranda, I got caught in the crossfire, trying to help people. I got hurt, and I took other people with me, do you understand?”  
  
“But you still helped,” said Miranda. “Wasn’t that worth it?”  
  
Garcia looked at her sadly. “Some days. Some days it is, some days it isn’t. You don’t want to have to live with that, Miranda.”  
  
“I could, though,” she said. “I think I could.”  
  
“I don’t want you to,” Garcia said.  
  
Miranda looked to the floor.  
  
“This is us,” said Garcia. “These are our things, Miranda, and I don’t think you need to be burdened with them. It’s ours, okay? So, go on, leave it. Please. For me?”  
  
“I,” tried Miranda.  
  
Looking sadly at her again, Garcia shook her head. “Be happy, live in the now. Let this go. It’s—it’s unhealthy, I know. I’m happy, I live in the now. Do I want him back? Of course I do, because it hurts that my genius brother Reid is gone but I have to keep living. I have to keep going, because that’s what he would want. We tried, Miranda, and we’re trying, but—we have to be happy, because we can’t let them win.”  
  
 _They win if we stop. I think he’d want to be found_ , thought Miranda. Because maybe he would want them to be happy without him, not to dwell, but she’d want to be found. She’d want Lily to know what had happened, even if no one else would possibly care.   
  
“Just be happy, Miranda,” said Garcia after Miranda had been silent for so long, and she left. Miranda stared at where she had been.  
  
She had never known that many happy people in her life; she figured the now had a lot to do with it, and the past.  
  
  
  
Miranda’s mother drank. She was happy, really happy, then, for those few minutes, when she wasn’t there.


	4. part four

From SSA Hotchner’s personal report:  
  
 _Gideon sighed. He stood in the doorway, arms folded just so and his stance the same as always, like a ghost of a memory. He didn’t look at me like he pitied me. But he was my last ditch attempt and so he might have pitied me some. Or maybe he just understood.  
  
I had always been terrified of becoming Gideon. I can’t let him understand; I can’t be him.  
  
I can’t run away, not like him.  
  
“Aaron,” he said again. “What makes you think they’ve kept him alive after all this time?”  
  
“He’s an agent,” I said, the same old argument over and over again. “They wouldn’t kill him. They’re scared. They’ve been taking women who can’t defend themselves and, while Reid doesn’t look like much, he’s a threat. We’re a threat, and we’re coming for him.”  
  
“But they could have killed him,” he said. “It’s been over a month.”  
  
“They could have,” I allowed, mainly just to end it.  
  
“Maybe,” said Gideon, “maybe then we should bury him.”  
  
I stared at Gideon for a long moment and then said, “I’ll think about it. Thank you for meeting me.”  
  
“If you need anything,” he said, his eyes dark and inscrutable as always, “I’m here.”  
  
I could have said anything to him, to tell him how much I blamed him and how much I did not, but I said nothing of the sort. I said, “Goodbye, Jason.”  
  
“Goodbye, Aaron,” he said and then I left.  
  
Sometimes, I think about Elle Greenaway and how I might have contributed to what happened to her, what caused her to break and leave us. I have not seen her in some time, but I can imagine what it would be like, how she would look at me. I do not think that she would blame me for what happened to Spencer; I believe she would understand but I do think she would blame me for not looking harder.  
  
We are looking harder. We are looking so hard, but I do not believe that she would be able to see past her own pain, and how I failed her. Sometimes, I feel as though I gave up on her. I should have tried harder for her, like I am trying for Spencer, and I should not have let her go. I should have brought her home myself, or made her stay with us, sleep on a couch, and I should have seen what was happening. I am a profiler, it is what I do.  
  
And yet I failed.  
  
I should not be writing this.  
  
But I will not run away. I will stand my ground. We have been taken off the case, but I have to do this. I cannot let the ghosts of all these people I let run away, that I watched suffer and did nothing about, run this team.  
  
I will not give up. _  
  
At the bottom of the page, written in with pencil in handwriting like a typewriter, it said:  _we won’t have a funeral without a body. That would be too easy._  
  
There was once something else, too, but it had been erased and now long forgotten.  
  
These things were not included in the electronic type up of the case file.  
  
  
  
It was February and it had just snowed for nine straight days. The sky threatened to spill more, but the weathermen were saying the storm had finally stopped after dropping one and a half feet of snow on the ground, a few inches each day. Miranda hadn’t looked at Spencer’s files in two and a half months.  
  
But her fingers itched.  
  
  
  
At her desk, Miranda had built a cabin from #2 pencils that she had been slowly stealing from the supply closet on the fourth floor. She had a lot of free time in the beginning of the year, because people never really had files to put away then. The rush came in December, before the year’s end, and she was tearing at her hair then, kept so busy.  
  
Not now. She wasn’t busy at all and that let her think—it let her think about things that were not hers but had burrowed into her life anyway, that had started something, like the first domino falling over into the others.  
  
It was five in the afternoon, on a Wednesday, and Miranda thought,  _An empty house. The mechanic. The graveyard. I have to do it now._  
  
She had been told to drop it, to leave well enough alone, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.  
  
Spencer needed to be free, and Miranda was going to be the one doing it.  
  
Miranda shot up from her desk, racing around the aisles of her archives, searching for the files she had put away months ago and stuffing them into her valise. She couldn’t wait any longer, being frightful and scared and bowed under the weight of this. She couldn’t let people boss her about with this, tell her what she could and could not do, what she should and should not—because Spencer was waiting for her. That was the ending of the story, nothing else. The ending was Spencer, and her, against the world.  
  
She had to act, and so she was.  
  
Once her valise was full, Miranda left her archives at what was honestly a run. She was on the metro in no time, alert and awake, not daydreaming and about to miss her stop. She pulled out a bit of scrap paper and started to make a list of places to checked, of all the places that had stuck in her mind from all those files she read: the house a family kept empty, old haunts, a graveyard where several girls had been laid to rest. These were places that had been check but Miranda just had a feeling that something could be there.  
  
Her heart was beating so fast, like an engine of a car, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. She was really going to do this. She was.  
  
When her stop came, she was the first person up and out, her valise against her chest, and she was running again, nearly slipping on the icy streets near Logan Circle. She ran into her building past one of the other residents who was coming out, nearly knocking the man over, and she didn’t even bother to call an apology over her shoulder.  
  
This was really it, for her, for him, for them all.  
  
Miranda flew into the apartment and slammed the door behind her, leaning against it, breathless and high on excitement.  
  
Lily was curled up on the couch, her sketchbook on her knee, a pencil in hand, and popcorn in her mouth, watching  _Inkheart_.  
  
“Paul Bettany,” she said, spraying bits of popcorn about, “why you have to break my heart, boo?”  
  
“I’m going to find Spencer tomorrow,” said Miranda.  
  
Lily paused the film. “Excuse me?”  
  
“Tomorrow,” repeated Miranda. “I’m going to go out and I’m going to find Spencer. Look, I made a list of places.”  
  
“Did you go  _insane_?” asked Lily.  
  
“No,” she said. “I want you to come with me.”  
  
Lily’s eyes had gone huge and her eyebrows were making a break for freedom. “What? I thought you gave this up, Manda! I thought you saw reason and realized this was just totally crazy, this obsession.”  
  
“I can’t,” she said. “Could you? Could you give this all up?”  
  
“I don’t,” said Lily. “You’re obsessed, Miranda. This is. Jesus.”  
  
Miranda looked at the television. Paul Bettany, Dustfinger, brought forth from the pages of a book when he was read aloud, was missing his family and he wanted to go home, back to his black and white pages, back to his Roxanne. He didn’t care that his fate was written into thin paper, that his fate that waitlisted him for death. He wanted to go  _home_.  
  
“He wants to go home,” she said aloud.  
  
Lily blinked. “What?”  
  
“Dustfinger wants to go home to his family,” said Miranda. “He wants to go back to the place he belonged. He wants to be set free and I want to set him free.”  
  
“Manda,” she said.  
  
“Listen to me!” Miranda shouted, startling herself. That didn’t sound like her. She never yelled.  
  
It had obviously scared Lily too, because she was just standing there now.  
  
Miranda clenched her jaw. “I can’t—I want to set Spencer free. He has people waiting for him, and I don’t think—I don’t think—”  
  
“Do you think this is normal?” asked Lily, which was a question that was usually pretty rich coming from her, of all people.  
  
“He’s someone they  _loved_ , Lily,” Miranda told her, frantic. “Did he ever  _know_? They were removed from the case, and they kept working on it. Did he know he was special to them?”  
  
She looked at Miranda like she was sad but then Lily always looked sad. She said, “You shouldn’t get wrapped up into this. It’s not good for you, Miranda.”  
  
“But?” she said, eyebrows and hopes up.  
  
“But,” Lily sighed, “I’ll come with you.”  
  
  
  
The next morning, Miranda knocked on Lily’s bedroom door and was gratified to see that they had both learned their stealth styles from old Grace Kelly movies. Lily had a camel colored coat, big sunglasses, and her wild hair tamed into a bun; Miranda had on her normal green pea-coat and a gray-blue scarf around her hair.  
  
This would be Miranda’s clear cut ending: the princess will save the prince. Her coat was her chain mail, her scarf her helmet, her valise her shield. Lily was her chief handmaiden and confidant, always there and always believing in her, even if she thought she was going mad. They were the characters and that was the ending: it would be happy, for once, for all of them.  
  
“I finished my commission for the coffee shop,” said Lily in greeting, pulling something out of her black art case.  
  
“Oh?” said Miranda.  
  
“Look,” said Lily and shoved the drawing into Miranda’s arms.  
  
It was the woman climbing the dark castle wall, reaching up to grasp the branch of the tree and something else—except, Lily had drawn it in. The something else that had always been unknown was now a hand, stretching downward to the woman. In the tree, chained with branch limbs and leaves, was a man.  
  
His face was Spencer’s.  
  
“Lily,” said Miranda.  
  
“It came to me last night,” she admitted, “after you had left. I saw her reaching up and there he was, in the tree, waiting for her—you—to cut him down.”  
  
“It’s me?” Miranda asked.  
  
Lily nodded. “It’s you. You can’t see your face but—she’s got your hair.”  
  
Looking at the charcoal drawing, Miranda saw that the woman in the picture’s face was now obscured by shadow and her hair was in two braids.  
  
She handed the piece back to Lily, who put it back into her black case.  
  
“Let’s go,” said Miranda.  
  
“Yeah,” agreed Lily. “We have a mystery to solve.”  
  
 _No, we don’t,_  Miranda thought.  _We know the ending. We find him. We find Spencer._  
  
It was just getting there that was the problem.  
  
They walked into the living room where Lily put her case on the couch and they grabbed their bags, Lily with her little pearl clutch and Miranda with her brown valise. They left, locking the door behind them, and made their way through the snow covered streets to the metro stop.  
  
“Where first?” asked Lily as they stared at the different lines.  
  
“My archives,” said Miranda, leading the way. “We need to pick up some files.”  
  
They got on the proper line and rode it to the FBI building, where Miranda flashed her ID and signed Lily in as a guest. They went down to Sub-Basement Three, Lily looking around curiously, and picked up the files that Miranda had left in her haste to get home the day before.  
  
She stood at her desk for a moment and then asked, “Do you want to see his desk?”  
  
Lily, who had been staring around Miranda’s dark and huge archives, her eyes wide—she’d never been before—turned around. “Whose desk?”  
  
“The one they keep empty,” said Miranda. “Spencer’s.”  
  
She was silent for a moment. “Okay.”  
  
Nodding, Miranda lead her out and back to the elevator. They rode up to seven, hiding themselves in the corner as the elevator filled and emptied on the way, and then exited. The pair stood outside the glass walls of the BAU, so close their noses almost pressed against them.  
  
“There,” Miranda said, pointing. The empty desk shined in the center of the room, bright and gray in a sea of cluttered and heavy desks.  
  
“Who’s who?” asked Lily, looking around.  
  
“Agent Prentiss,” said Miranda, gesturing quickly to the agent at work at her desk. “That’s Agent Rossi, and SSA Hotchner is in his office, and Agent Morgan there.”  
  
“Oh,” said Lily, meaningfully, when she spotted Agent Morgan.  
  
Miranda agreed. Agent Morgan was handsome, strong, smart, and hit on anything with a pulse—and meant it with utter genuineness. He didn’t like what Miranda was digging into with Spencer’s case but he still had a smile for her—not like SSA Hotchner, but Miranda thought he never smiled.  
  
“Is that Agent Morgan?” she asked.  
  
Miranda nodded.  
  
“You were right,” breathed Lily. “He totally looks like Malcolm from  _Y &R_.”  
  
Lily and Miranda had developed a pretty debilitating addiction to  _The Young and the Restless_  when they were in college. They would spend their hours off from class, swirling around in their soap opera world. It had been amazing, allowing them to drift away from their own problems—drugs, alcohol, parents, studies—and give them to the people on the show. It always seemed so much worse for them, and it made them feel better.  
  
Malcolm and everyone else had gotten them through some very tough times, though they admittedly also created some, like the time Miranda almost failed a math class when the TiVo somehow deleted three episodes, including the finale.  
  
Upon reflection, Miranda figured that it had probably been an overreaction, setting that trashcan on fire, and the rest of the night could have definitely gone better.  
  
“We should go before they see us,” said Lily then, tearing her eyes away from Agent Morgan. Miranda, still watching, nodded and allowed herself to be lead back to the elevator. Lily pressed the down button and then entered, Miranda behind her. Lily, who liked elevators for some inexplicable reason, hit the lobby button.  
  
When they entered the lobby, Lily stopped them. She turned to Miranda. “So, are we taking the metro or a cab or what?”  
  
“Uh,” Miranda said, thinking. They needed to go to Virginia and to Maryland and some places in the district so they probably were going to have to take cabs. She wished one of them had a car—well, that she had a car, Lily never learned to drive, having lived in D.C. all her life. Riding cabs all day was going to be expensive.  
  
But it had to be done.  
  
“Cab,” she said eventually. She nodded her head to herself and started to walk.  
  
Toby from Accounts Payable appeared out of thin air next to them. He was wearing a black overcoat, a weird, multi-colored scarf, and a black beanie that his hair stuck out from under. His glasses were askew. He rolled a set of keys between gloved hands and asked, breath misting in the frozen air, “So, what are we doing?”  
  
“What?” asked Miranda.  
  
“You guys are dressed like gumshoes,” he said with a shrug. “I figured you were doing some international espionage or something and I thought that’d be cool and wondered if you needed a getaway driver.”  
  
“It’s not  _espionage_ ,” Miranda told him, frowning. “We’re doing field research for a case.”  
  
“That’s cool too,” said Toby. “I didn’t know you did casework.”  
  
Lily glanced at Miranda, looking like she was about to say something, but Miranda stepped on her foot. Toby didn’t notice.  
  
Holding up his keys, he asked, “So, getaway driver?”  
  
“No,” Miranda said at the same time as Lily said, with great feeling, “Yes.”  
  
Toby blinked. This time, Lily stepped on Miranda’s foot and Miranda bit out, “Yes, thanks, we could use a driver.”  
  
He beamed. “My car’s on six, c’mon.”  
  
As he walked away towards the elevator, Miranda and Lily stayed a few feet behind. Lily nudged her in the arm and whispered, “He’s cute. In a geeky, I spend my nights watching  _Doctor Who_  and building stuff out of Lego kind of way.”  
  
“But it’s Toby,” said Miranda. “He’s an accountant.”  
  
“And you’re a librarian and I’m an artist,” said Lily. “I don’t even work for the FBI. We’re not exactly a crack team of detectives, Manda. He seems like a good guy. Plus, he’s got a car and I imagine the  _Doctor Who_  knowledge might come in handy for quick problem solving out in the field.”  
  
“Lily,” Miranda said, but she was striding away from her, up to Toby, to introduce herself and probably become best friends and tell him all about the case, which would make Toby think she was weird, which she was, but it wasn’t not like she needed it broadcasted on all frequencies, though Toby was pretty strange too and maybe he’d think it was a righteous cause or something—  
  
“Crap,” she said, seeing that they were at the elevator, and sped up to catch up with them.   
  
  
  
The tiny, computerized voice of John Cleese was guiding Toby’s Datsun Sportster, best days last seen in the mid-seventies, to the first location just outside of Alexandria. John Cleese, of course, lived in the GPS in Toby’s car and he cracked very bad jokes. The Datsun itself was bright red, bore a bumper sticker that advised other drivers to not  _mess with Texas_ , had a First Aid kit and a golf umbrella on the floor, and was very clean. It was also had no airbags, three ashtrays, and was impossibly small. Miranda was relegated to the tiny backseat because Lily (a) called shotgun, no blitz, and (b) was nearly as tall as Toby himself and therefore couldn’t fit in the backseat without breaking a bunch of traffic laws.  
  
Not that Toby likely had any qualms about traffic laws, given his driving skills. When they first got into the car, Toby checked all the mirrors, his gauges, swiveled his head in all different directions, turned on the GPS, checked his seatbelt, and checked the mirrors and gauges again. He then threw the Datsun into gear like he hadn’t done any of that, peeling out of his parking space with a screeching noise and enough force to push Lily back into her seat and Miranda flat out over. He drove like he was out in his grandpa’s truck at the ranch back home in Texas.  
  
They listened to classic rock the entire way and Toby knew all of the lyrics, which was pretty cool, Miranda had to admit once her blood pressure had started to make it back into the Earth’s atmosphere. Lily looked freaked out the entire time though.  
  
“Do you like Zeppelin?” he asked her when they were halfway there, looking at her through the review mirror.  
  
She nodded.  
  
“As much as Iron & Wine?” he asked.  
  
“Totally different animals,” Miranda told him. He smiled and looked at the road again.  
  
All of these new bits of Toby fit together into a kind of odd puzzle: the tiny car, the driving skills, the music, the GPS set to talk like John Cleese—it all made sense, in such a weird way, when paired with all her previous data of him. He was an accountant with thick glasses from Texas and Lily was probably right when she said he spent his evenings watching  _Doctor Who_  and building stuff out of Lego, not that there was anything wrong with that.  
  
And he had a sense of adventure, of a righteous cause, of doing the right thing even if it might be risky.  
  
He had nodded seriously through Miranda telling him what they were really doing and he agreed that, if there was a chance of finding Spencer, of finding him at all, then they had to take that chance. He didn’t make fun of Miranda for wanting to do this, for developing feelings for someone who she only knew out of second-hand tales and pictures in old files. Toby had nodded and said that Spencer’s team deserved to know what happened, for better or worse.  
  
He looked like he meant it, like Miranda meant it: with every little thing in them.  
  
Lily was right. Toby was a pretty all right guy.  
  
Even if he did drive like a crazy person.  
  
  
  
Just outside of Alexandria, they pulled up next to a house that had been empty for some four years. A girl had lived there, named Georgia, and she had disappeared one day. Two years later, they found her buried by the interstate in Maryland, with seven other young women who had disappeared one day too. The house was empty because Georgia’s parents couldn’t sell it. They didn’t know how to let go of the last bits of their child and so they kept it, with all her things still in there and a yard still well maintained, like maybe the DNA tests and dental records were wrong and Georgia would someday come home to that house, would come home to them.  
  
Toby pulled the Datsun up on the opposite side of the street, parking and turning it off. The three of them emerged from the car into the cold, walking across to the sidewalk in front of the house.  
  
Miranda looked at it and then the sky. It was dark and crowded with clouds and the wind blew bitterly; another snowstorm was coming. A wind chime on the porch rang and she looked at the house again.  
  
“I don’t think anyone’s here,” said Toby.  
  
“Yeah,” said Lily. She still sounded a little shaky from the car ride. Miranda nodded and took a few steps closer, glancing at the doorknob and the curtains in the windows that did not flutter one bit.  
  
“Not here,” she said, listening as the wind chime continued to swing back and forth and ring out the clear, bright sound it made. “They never kept him here.”  
  
“If they had,” said Lily, rubbing her arms. “That would have been so horrible.”  
  
“But it would have made sense,” Toby said, glancing hesitantly at Miranda. “I mean, who would check the house of a dead girl? Certainly not her parents.”  
  
Lily made a horrified face but Miranda nodded again, because Toby had said just what she had thought when she had learned about the empty house in the files. Georgia was long gone and even if the family kept the house, they wouldn’t have been able to go in. Her not being there would make it real. Keeping an empty house, an empty desk—that’s just waiting.  
  
They piled back into Toby’s Datsun, Miranda again in the back, and Toby repeated his start-up ritual. Lily had her head pressed against the glass, eyes screwed shut, and if she was religious, she would have been praying. Miranda leaned back and prepared herself.  
  
When they roared to life and sped away, Toby turned on the radio. Led Zeppelin was playing again on his cassette player and Robert Plant sang, _There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving_.  
  
“Where to?” he asked.  
  
“Maryland,” Miranda told him. “The mechanic’s.”  
  
  
  
It was empty too, run out of business some years ago by the local Sears—Toby had asked at the library down the street—and there was no hint, no clues at all. They walked around the empty building though, always checking.  
  
Next was a local bar, which might as well have been closed for all the good it did them, and then the home of another victim. Someone new lived there now and they had never met the previous tenet.  
  
Down Miranda’s list they went, place after place as useless as the first: an apartment building, a church, the street where someone swore they had seen the fourth girl taken, and on and on and on.  
  
  
  
At three in the afternoon, six hours after they had started, Miranda stood in a graveyard where the bodies of two victims were buried, eight rows and two plots away. She wondered if they were buried on the same day and if their parents ever saw each other, if ever they looked up and saw someone as sad and broken as they were. She wondered if they ever spoke.  
  
At the grave of Elaine Watson, Lily was laying down a bouquet of flowers she had bought for the occasion. Toby was standing by a tree, his hands in his pockets and an uncomfortable look on his face.  
  
Miranda looked down at the grave at her feet. Samantha Popliski, who was only two years younger than Miranda when she was taken. She was the most recent victim, the one taken before Mary Meno. She was the girl who starved to death.  
  
Miranda felt frustrated and sick and she wanted to scream at the gray and thick sky for giving her hope and then dashing it one these gravestones. But she just sucked in breath after breath and tried to stay calm. Losing her head wouldn’t help Spencer; it wouldn’t get them any closer to finding him. She had to stay level-headed and clear-eyed to rescue him.  
  
As she stood there, in the graveyard, she thought of Marshal Ortega, his team, and the eight dead women. She thought of the other women who might be dead too. She thought of the BAU. All these people that those brothers made into victims and ghosts and madmen.  
  
“Manda,” called Lily, her voice pitched low out of respect. Miranda looked up and saw Lily and Toby making their way across the street to Toby’s car, where they had parked in front of a coffee place; Lily was gesturing at her to come over. They were done in this place.  
  
Miranda started to make her way over, as Lily climbed into the car and Toby held his seat back so she could climb in behind it. Once in, Toby followed suit and started up his car. It roared to life in the clanging way that old cars did and shook a little. Lily and Miranda exchanged glances.  
  
“Totally normal,” said Toby, glancing into the rearview mirror. “Sometimes when it’s this cold, the old Sportster has a bit of starting trouble. Like me, it is from Texas, in the heat. Nothing out of the ordinary. Let me just—”  
  
He trailed off into a mutter, turning the car off and jiggling some things that Miranda was pretty sure didn’t need to be jiggled on most cars. Admittedly, her car experiences were limited to her parents old Crown Vic, and the Volvo she had shared with Drew, Steve, and Matt, and the occasional cab but she had watched a lot of TV in her time and there were many scenes in cars.  
  
Toby turned the key again. There was the clanging noise again. It slowly changed into a rumble and then something that sounded like large rocks in a dryer.  
  
Lily was glancing between Miranda, the car door, and the windows, as if judging how quickly she could get out and whether or not to leave Miranda behind. Miranda thought maybe that was a bit unfair; she meant, maybe it was her idea to find and save Spencer but letting Toby in on the search had been all Lily. Either they both got out or they all went down with the ship.  
  
When the Datsun started smoking, Toby said, “Well, that’s never happened before.”  
  
“Oh,” said Miranda, putting a hand over her mouth. Lily’s hands were scrambling along the leather of the door, searching frantically for a way out. Toby was poking at the ignition and his keys, curiously.  
  
People walking along the street were beginning to stare.  
  
Then, all of the sudden, the horrible noises the car was making stopped and the smoke disappeared.   
  
Miranda pulled her hand down, slowly, and Lily stopped her attempts at getting free.  
  
Toby tried the keys one last time. Nothing happened.  
  
“Seriously,” he said. “This has never happened before. Ever. I’m shocked.”  
  
Miranda personally didn’t think he sounded that shocked but she didn’t voice her opinion aloud.   
  
There was an awkward moment of silence and Toby pulled out his phone, saying, “I’ll call Triple A.”  
  
He dialed and waited. Lily asked, quietly, “Should we still be in the car?”  
  
“Hi, yes, this is Toby Correia,” he was saying into his phone. He gave their location and said, “My car made some odd noises when it started and then it started smoking. Oh, it’s stopped now, but the car won’t start. No, this has never happened before. Yes, I’m positive.”  
  
“Ask them if we should still be in the car,” hissed Lily.  
  
Miranda wondered if this ever happened to the BAU. She figured it never did. This was their calling, their job, their duty. They were built and hardwired for daring rescues and adventure. Miranda and Lily and Toby, they were in it for this one moment, to save someone, and then they were going to be out, heroes for one person and some families.  
  
Plus—Miranda imagined the BAU had cars made in this decade too. That probably didn’t hurt.  
  
“Thank you,” Toby was saying. He hung up and turned in his seat. “They’ll be here in half an hour to tow us to my mechanic in the district. They said we should just stay put in the car and, yes, Lily, they say it’s safe.”  
  
But she wasn’t looking at them anymore. Her eyes were glued to somewhere out the front window.  
  
“Miranda,” she said, her voice hushed even in the quiet. She was pointing forward, her hand low to not draw attention to it. Miranda looked.  
  
Getting into the passenger side of a car in front of them was a man with a face Miranda thought she would never, ever forget: wide set light eyes, thin nose, screwy ears, small mouth, blond hair, and a weak chin. He looked over his shoulder and his eyes met hers briefly before he was in the car, like the moment never happened.  
  
On autopilot, Miranda was climbing out of the back, over Lily, and out onto the street. She could hear Toby calling for her, and Lily following, and Miranda hailed a cab.  
  
“It’s one of them,” said Lily to Toby, her voice coming from somewhere very far away.  
  
“What?” he asked, on the street now too.  
  
“It’s one of the unsubs,” said Miranda, running for a cab as it came to a halt several feet up. She trusted that the others were following behind. “It’s one of the men who took Spencer.”  
  
Toby’s eyes went wide and Miranda opened the door of the cab. The three of them slid into the back like a scene from a fifties screwball comedy and Lily shouted, pointing, “Follow that car!”  
  
Miranda thought it sound pretty ridiculous in real life but the cabbie shrugged and followed, doing so in a manner that suggested he had either done this before or had watched a lot of films.  
  
There was a long, tense moment of silence as the cab driver followed the car carrying the murderous brothers out of the Maryland town and onto the interstate. They stayed a consistent three cars behind them and drove at the same speed. She felt like she was going to throw up or maybe laugh. She couldn’t decide.  
  
Eventually, the cabbie looked back at them through the rearview mirror. He grinned.  
  
“So, what’s this all about?” he asked.  
  
Lily said, “I honestly don’t know,” and Toby said, “Well,” but then Miranda opened her mouth, words suddenly tumbling out and unable to stop, like a faucet with a broken knob.  
  
“I found this picture in this file where I work,” she said, “and he just stared out at me and I had to know what had happened to him, why he was in the file. He had been kidnapped, see, two years ago, on this case he had been working about these murdered girls, girls my age, and these men took them and killed them and then they took him, Spencer, his name is Spencer. They took Spencer from his family, took him away, and they searched and searched and they were taken off the case and they never found him and they’ve been waiting for  _two years_. Two  _whole_  years and I’ve been reading everything and thinking about it and we were looking for him, to save him, because they’ve trapped him in some castle somewhere and just now, just now, we saw one of them and they’re in that car and that’s where Spencer is, wherever they are going and we have to stop them before they hurt anyone else and we have to find him, because it’s not fair and he’s been waiting so long.”  
  
Miranda gasped for air, a huge series of noises in the sudden quiet of the cab.  
  
“Wow,” said the cabbie.  
  
Lily, on her left, nodded, eyes huge, and Toby grasped a few of her fingers, the leather of his gloves warm on her bare, winter chilled skin, but she barely noticed either of them.  
  
The cabbie glanced into the rearview mirror again, looking between Miranda and Toby. He said, “That’s quite the pistol you’ve got there, son.”  
  
Toby stared sidelong at Miranda and said, quietly, “I know.”  
  
They all fell silent once more, still tense and coiled for action. Minutes like hours passed and the car turned off the interstate, onto a yellow looking dirt road cut into woods. Past the woods, up on a hill, they could see a bit of something that looked like a cabin. Miranda’s heart felt like it was stuck in her throat. They turned too, onto the road, and they drove every so slow.  
  
A mile down the road, they weren’t any closer to the cabin but Miranda asked the cabbie to stop. She didn’t want to risk being heard or seen, even if it meant they’d have to walk for a while through the snowy woods.  
  
The trio climbed out of the cab. Toby and Lily stretched a little but Miranda stared straight ahead.  
  
The cabbie rolled down his window, leaning out and his breath crystallizing in the air. “Do you want me to wait for you guys? Or call the cops or something?”  
  
“Thank you,” said Miranda. “But we’ve got it.”  
  
“We do?” said Toby, very quietly, but Miranda ignored him, pulling her wallet out of her bag to pay the man. He waved a hand at her.  
  
“Forget it, kids,” he said. “This beats the time I drove the Senator and his mistress. I’ve waited my whole career for something like this to happen. Good luck.”  
  
He rolled his window back up and back quickly down the way he had come. Miranda, Lily, and Toby, standing there on the edge of the woods, watched him go.  
  
“I’m going to call Agent Morgan,” Miranda announced quietly. “He’ll send someone out. He’ll come out.”  
  
“So we’re going to wait?” asked Lily, hands shoved deeply into her coat pockets and shifting on her feet.  
  
“No,” she said, pulling her cell phone out now. “Then we go in.”  
  
Lily blinked.  
  
“Okay,” said Toby, nodding.  
  
Miranda opened her phone and dialed. It rang twice.  
  
“Morgan,” he said, when he picked up.  
  
She took a deep breath. “It’s Miranda Jones. We’ve found the men who took Spencer.”   
  
“What?” Morgan asked, his voice flat. “Miranda, don’t—”  
  
“It’s true,” she said. “We saw the Francis brothers, I’ve seen their pictures in the files, and we saw them. I know what they look like, Agent Morgan, please.”  
  
There was a long silence. “You’re sure?”  
  
“Yes,” she said, trying to put every bit of herself and her conviction into the word. “We’re going to find him.”  
  
“Miranda,” he said. “Where are you?”  
  
“Off the interstate,” she said.  
  
“Garcia,” shouted Morgan. “Trace this call. Miranda, you need to stay right where you are and don’t do anything, okay? Don’t move, don’t do anything at all. Don’t be stupid,” he said, voice firm and loud. “Don’t do anything stupid.”  
  
“Too late,” said Miranda and she snapped her phone shut, Morgan’s tinny, shrill voice disappearing in that sharp snap of plastic.  
  
“Well,” said Toby, after a moment. “That seemed to go well.”  
  
“Sure,” said Lily, shoving her hands in her pockets.  
  
Miranda looked over her shoulder, down the road the cab had backed away from them on, and then she looked the other way, towards the end and the cabin. Setting her jaw, she turned to her companions, her friends. On the edge of the road, they stood there, three people searching for truth and justice and happy endings.  
  
“Okay,” she said.  
  
“Okay?” Toby repeated.  
  
“Yes,” said Miranda.  
  
“Yeah,” sighed Lily.  
  
Miranda started to walk, moving off the road and into the woods, and Lily and Toby followed. Eventually, Toby overtook her and took the lead, moving through tree line. He walked with his hands sort of outstretched, in an almost attack position, as if he was ready for combat at anytime. Miranda rather doubted his hands held like that could do anything. Her brother Drew had taken karate all through high school and she had seen him fight before. He never held his hands like that.  
  
As they walked, slow and watchful, every sound seemed louder and sharper. Stepping onto fresh snow was like breaking glass and hitting the occasional twig was like hearing a car accident happen. Miranda was nearly holding her breath, desperate to control whatever sound she could.   
  
The forest started to thin out the closer they got to the cabin and, by the time they were at the edge of the clearing in which it was built, there was barely any cover. They tried to find what they could, hiding out of breath behind skinny trees to avoid being seen right away.  
  
She stared at the wooden building. It wasn’t covered in ivy and it didn’t look particularly evil, but the yard was covered in debris, wood and mechanical bits, and she imagined the building itself didn’t need to be evil, when evil lived in it.  
  
Miranda glanced over at Lily and then Toby, each behind a tree of their own. They each nodded in silent communiqué and then they began to walk cautiously forward.  
  
As they approached the cabin, something was niggling between Miranda’s shoulders, like an itch or something burning, and she turned, finding herself face to face with handsome Walt Francis.  
  
She got off half a scream before he put his hand on her mouth. Lily froze and turned before running at him and trying to jump on him.  
  
Kevin Francis had zeroed in on Toby, intent on taking down what Miranda could only assume he identified as the largest threat, based on gender. They were starting to grapple with one another and, even though Miranda herself was struggling to be free of Walt, she watched. She felt strangely detached from everything.  _Shock_ , she thought and then,  _Adrenaline_.  
  
She kicked and bit at Walt, and Lily was pummeling her fists against his back.  
  
Kevin swung a closed fist at Toby, hitting him right in the mouth. He stumbled, tripping over his feet, and nearly fell. When he came up again, lip split open and bleeding down his chin, Toby had a plank of fairway wood in his gloved hands. He seemed slightly surprised that he had managed to get a hold of it but determined nonetheless.  
  
Toby hefted the piece of wood and swung like an MLB player, connecting with the side of the evil looking Francis brother’s face. He dropped and Toby, staring down at the body, plank still in hand, said in a deep voice, “I’m Batman.”  
  
Walt had finally managed to knock Lily loose and to the ground and grabbed Miranda around her thin upper arms tightly. He used his greater strength and weight to throw her over his shoulder, intent upon taking her away from the group.  
  
He was going to kill her.  
  
From where he was, Toby saw. He threw his plank of wood down and started to charge, his face set.  
  
He got about a foot before hitting the wood he had been previously wielding and he fell flat on his face in the snow.  
  
Miranda was barely aware of it, too busy trying to take care of herself.  
  
She used to dance ballet. She had been good at it, because she was small and lithe and quick on her naturally arch-less feet, but she had never liked it. She had never wanted to follow the beat of the other girls, or tie her hair into a high bun so tight that it pulled her scalp red and bleeding.  
  
But her mother had been a dancer too, and it made her parents proud.  
  
She had always wanted to learn karate though, like her brothers before her. She used to dress up in her eldest brother Drew’s old work out clothes and tie his old belts around her waist, watching old martial arts films and mimicking the moves.  
  
Miranda furiously kicked up with her knee, digging it into the man’s forehead. When he dropped like a stone, she went with him. As soon as they hit the ground, Miranda was rolling away and sitting up. She looked at Lily, who was staring at her with wide eyes. Miranda said, “I didn’t think that was going to work.”  
  
Lily nodded. “Me either.”  
  
Miranda stood, staring at the body on the ground and then moved to go help Lily up, before turning to look at Toby, who was on his chest in the snow. She walked over to him.  
  
Toby grinned up at her, lip still bleeding freely. “The only way that could have been any more awesome was if you had shouted,  _By the power of Greyskull_ , when you took that guy out.”  
  
She smiled at him and held a hand out for him, to help him up too. They stood for a moment then, smiling at one another.  
  
“Are we doing this?” asked Lily. Miranda turned and saw that she was standing near the steps of the cabin’s porch, her arms wrapped around herself, shivering. It had started to snow again.  
  
“Yes,” said Miranda and she moved past Lily, onto the porch. The others followed with her and they pushed through the screen door, into the cabin.  
  
It was dark and cold, barely lit and no heat on. Lily grabbed an old looking and tarnished candlestick from off the table by the entrance. She held it out above her shoulder, ready to swing.  
  
“This is seriously every horror movie ever,” whispered Toby.  
  
Miranda ignored him once more but, like Lily, reached out for some sort of weapon. Her searching hands came up with an ugly vase.  
  
Then, they slowly, slowly went through every room on the first floor. By some unspoken agreement, it was Toby who kicked all of the doors open quietly and Miranda and Lily entered right after, their makeshift weapons brandished as they searched.  
  
“Clear,” they would call to each other when they’d made sure the room was empty of people. Miranda briefly wondered if maybe they should have done something about the unconscious brothers but it blew out of her mind quickly. She knew she was drunk on adrenaline and her present invincibility, but she couldn’t care less. They were going to  _find him_. She knew it. She could feel it.  
  
Each room in the cabin was, predictably, empty. The living room was messy, the kitchen filled with dirty dishes, and the hallways filled with boxes and stacks of newspapers. It smelled like dirt and musty things, and something like evil, though that could have just been Miranda’s imagination. It probably was.  
  
But then this place, and those people, and all the years they had taken away form everyone.  
  
After they had covered every room, Miranda found herself at the steps leading to the second floor. She climbed with unsteady feet and something heavy in her chest. She couldn’t hear anything but her own breathing, the creak of the steps, and the howl of the winter wind against the walls.  
  
This was it. This had to be it.  
  
With her foot hovering over the last step, Miranda looked behind her, over her shoulder, at her friends behind her on the steps. They were all smeared with mud and snow, and Lily’s hair had been knocked loose from its bun, wild curls around her perfect, dirty face again. Toby’s glasses had cracked in his fall, his beanie was long gone, his dark messy hair going every which way, and his lip was swollen and cracked open, oozing blood slowly now. His mouth was bruising blue and purple at its corners. They looked grim and determined.  
  
And Miranda, who had lost her scarf too, braids tumbling down her back, turned her face forward and took the last step onto the second floor.  
  
It was one long hall, with doors on all sides, and a similar cluttered mess. They went together into rooms, again, moving left to right as they went, pushing open the doors to the small rooms and glancing in. Miranda was in the lead, Toby now holding her ugly vase at her shoulder, and Lily with her candlestick covering them, always looking over her shoulder.   
  
Halfway down the hall, Miranda pushed a door open.  
  
There was nothing special about the door that she pushed. It was just a plain wood door, worn with age and use, and it slid open quietly, not even scraping on uneven, warped floorboards. It was just a door, and this was just a room.  
  
But in this room, there was a bed.  
  
And there was a pale arm, outstretched, and chains against the wall.  
  
Everything was so quiet and still, like lips numb with winter.  
  
“Holy,” started Toby.  
  
Lily screeched.  
  
Miranda spun about, looking briefly into Toby’s wide eyes before seeing the dark eyes of SSA Hotchner. He pushed Miranda and Toby out of the way and went at speed into the room, Agent Rossi and a blond man in HRT gear behind him. Agent Morgan had Lily tight by the arm and was pulling her away, all but carrying her, and Agents Jareau and Prentiss were swooping in after him, pushing behind Miranda and Toby and herding them down the stairs and out.  
  
Outside, in the snow, surrounded by FBI agents, SWAT and HRT, all along the perimeter ad guarding two unconscious bodies Miranda didn’t want to look at, Agent Morgan let go of Lily and wheeled on Miranda, who shrank back against Agent Prentiss, who was behind her.  
  
“What the  _hell_ ,” he hissed, “were you thinking?”  
  
Miranda couldn’t even open her mouth.  
  
“I told you to  _stay put_ , to stay where you were, because we were coming and we would go in and take care of business but no.  _No_. You had to go in.” There was a vein working in Agent Morgan’s forehead as he spoke, Miranda saw. “You aren’t even trained, Miranda, you could have—Jesus Christ, anything could have happened. The three—who are you?”  
  
Lily squeaked, eyes huge. Toby straightened his shoulders some and said, “Agent Toby Correia, of Accounts Payable,” though it came out very quiet and sort of shaky.  
  
“Great,” said Agent Morgan. “That’s just great. You guys are a Cracker Jack team of agents, who aren’t  _even agents_. What the hell made you think you could do this?”  
  
Miranda whispered, “We did.”  
  
“Oh, that I see,” he said, waving a hand.  
  
“We did,” repeated Toby, a little louder. He grabbed at Miranda’s arm, pulling her next to him, and Lily, who seemed to be in shock. “We fought them.”  
  
“Do you have training?” demanded Agent Morgan. “Do you have any training  _whatsoever_? You could have gotten killed.”  
  
“I thought my reflexes were cat-like,” said Toby, defensively, to Agent Morgan’s forehead.  
  
“That’s not good enough,” snapped Agent Morgan, his tone sharp like the edge of a broken window pane. Agents Prentiss and Jareau looked on, eyes wide, like they were watching a car accident unfold. Miranda felt like she was in a car accident.  
  
“We got,” she tried.  
  
“They had guns, Miranda!” he shouted. A few HRT agents visibly flinched at the sound. Lily did too, beside her; she felt it. In the tree line, birds took off. “They had guns, did you know that? Did you even  _think_  that that could be a possibility? Did you? Did you?”  
  
She bit her lip, looking away. Agent Morgan moved in close to her.  
  
“You didn’t,” he said, his voice low and dark. “You could have been killed, how do you think we would have felt, how we would have, how I—”  
  
Agent Prentiss stepped forward.  
  
“Derek,” she said, wrapping her pale fingers around his arm, making divots and ruts in the leather of his jacket. “Come on. Calm down. Come with me.”  
  
She pulled him away.  
  
“Fuck,” Miranda heard Agent Morgan say, before they were gone.  
  
Agent Jareau watched them go and then turned to them. Her eyes were red.  
  
“You’re all okay, right?” she asked. Miranda looked around. There was Toby’s lip, which was oozing slowly, and Lily seemed fine if shaky. Miranda’s own knee felt very warm, but she figured they were otherwise fine, so she nodded. Agent Jareau sighed, running a hand across her face.  
  
“Thank you,” she said.  
  
Miranda flinched.  
  
“What?” asked Toby.  
  
“Thank you,” Agent Jareau said again. “Morgan was out of line. You guys—you did something teams of overqualified agents spent years trying to do and, and I just wanted you to know that, okay? Because it’s. Thank you, for this, even if it might end horribly. Thank you.”  
  
The trio exchanged quick glances and Miranda offered, “That’s okay.”  
  
Agent Jareau smiled, a little sadly. “That’s the thing, Miranda, it’s not. But it might be. How—I forgot to ask—how did you guys get here anyway?”  
  
“Cab,” said Toby and looked like he was about to recount the entire tragedy of the Datsun before Agent Jareau cut in.  
  
“I’m going to go get someone to give you guys a lift home,” she said, with a nod like she was just deciding this on the spot. Miranda imagined that she was searching for something to do, so that she would not have to think about what was going on inside of the cabin. Agent Jareau nodded again and started to walk away from them, towards a small group of SWAT and HRT agents who hadn’t entered the cabin or were not guarding the two brothers.  
  
“Thank you,” called Miranda and, for some reason, perhaps because she had never, ever done this before, she added, “Miss J.J.”  
  
She turned, a small startled smile on her face at the name. It grew larger, slowly, and then she turned again and walked. Miranda watched her go, and then her eyes fell away from her, onto all the land and woods before them and around them.  
  
These were their killing fields.  
  
Miranda felt like she might be sick but was unsure whether it was because of the cold or the shock.  
  
Fresh snow was dusting the ground around them, clinging to the old and to their hair and clothes, making them all look older than their years.  
  
Her knee ached, dull but sharp, and she thought about the icy room where Tobias kept his father’s body, keeping him round even when he was so terrified and abused by the man. Maybe he did that because he was still so scared, frightened of himself and the man and all of his secrets, of what everything would mean, in the end. And then it was found. Then he was found.  
  
 _His father’s body was judgment day,_  she thought.  
  
Miranda stepped backwards until her calves hit the bumper of somebody’s car—she wasn’t sure if it was a patrol car or one of the BAU agent’s cars—and sat down on the hood.  
  
Looking around her, at all the agents moving around, HRT and SWAT and the BAU agents who had burst onto the scene and taken care of everything, Miranda felt like an imposter. Agent Morgan was right; she wasn’t a real agent. She was just a child, playing at being a hero. These men and women around her, who ached and strived, they were heroes.  
  
Toby took off his gloves and handed them to her. “Here.”  
  
He sat down on the hood next to her, Lily following suit, and they leaned into her.  
  
There was that boy, once, who killed himself in front of Spencer, and all Spencer had wanted to do was save him, save him from the world and from himself. He’d been trying to help.  
  
 _He can’t be dead,_  she thought and realized she said it aloud when Lily gripped her thigh tightly, and Toby pressed his side against hers.  
  
He slipped an arm around her shoulders and whispered, “It’s going to be okay.”  
  
She wanted to know how he knew that.  
  
But it would be too easy if Spencer were to die. After two years, and all that hope and wonder, and all they found was a body buried by the interstate? That wasn’t fair. It was too easy and it wasn’t fair, to any of them.  
  
Because they had searched and they had struggled, and if he were to be dead—if that was the monster at the end of this book, where would the struggle go?  
  
That wasn’t the right ending.  
  
“I know,” she said to Toby, then. “It has to be.”  
  
He gave her a weak smiled and Lily nodded, squeezing her thigh again. They watched the darkened cabin.  
  
A couple agents went into the cabin, and then a couple left. Agents Morgan and Prentiss went up to the porch and exchanged a few words. Miranda strained to hear them, but they were too far away. Agent Morgan reached out to Agent Prentiss but she rose up a hand to halt his progress and shook her head. She gestured to the door and then to Agent Morgan, and he nodded. She turned and went down the steps as he went into the cabin.  
  
Agent Prentiss was wearing boots that day, shiny brown ones that went nice with her jacket and that weren’t affected by the snow, apparently. Miranda shut her eyes, counted to ten, and tried to concentrate. When she opened them again, Agent Prentiss was next to Agent Jareau by the HRT outpost created out of the back of a truck.  
  
Minutes passed. A few more agents exited the cabin and then Agents Morgan and Rossi, smiling softly, exited and stood out on the porch. Agent Morgan nodded at Agents Prentiss and Jareau, who nodded back.  
  
The blond HRT agent— _Dan Torre_ , supplied Miranda’s mind—came onto the porch and bounded down the steps, clapping Agents Rossi and Morgan on the back as he went, grinning, before joining his team of agents at their makeshift outpost.  
  
Miranda stared at the doorway, not daring to breathe.  
  
SSA Hotchner came from the darkened house to the porch and he looked at Miranda, Toby, and Lily on the hood of that car, huddled in their winter jackets and curled in on each other. He looked sad, like Lily always looked sad, like there was something in him that could never be fixed, like there was something frozen deep down in his chest. Miranda thought maybe someone forgot to give him his heart, when they made him.  
  
Then, SSA Hotchner looked over his shoulder, into the house, and he stepped to the side of the door. A few paramedics she hadn’t noticed going in were bringing out a stretcher with a body on it and the body reached out and caught SSA Hotchner’s wrist. He smiled down and when he looked up again, at them, he was still smiling.  
  
Miranda smiled back at him so wide that she thought her mouth might break.  
  
She rose from the hood of the truck, feeling Toby and Lily do the same beside her. She took a few steps out, trying to move close to an ambulance on the edge of things, desperate to see him.  
  
She didn’t, missing her chance by moments. The paramedics loaded the stretcher onto the ambulance and SSA Hotchner and Agent Morgan were hopping into the back of it. The doors shut and Miranda closed her eyes.  
  
 _Spencer_ , she thought.  
  
Someone tapped her on the arm. She turned and fought the urge to jump.  
  
“I’m going to give you three a ride home,” said Agent Rossi, his voice miles kinder than the last time they spoke. He smiled. “Let’s go.”  
  
He turned, expecting them to follow. Miranda, out of habit, did, and Lily and Toby came with her.  
  
Agent Rossi drove an SUV and Miranda got into the back. Lily went with her and Toby looked for a moment like he might try to as well but he eventually moved to the passenger seat. Agent Rossi started the car; classical music came on.  
  
“So,” said Agent Rossi after they had been on the road for a few minutes. “Miss Jones, who’s your friend?”  
  
She looked over at Lily, who was working on wiping her face off with the edge of her sleeve.  
  
“This is Lily,” said Miranda. “She’s my roommate.”  
  
“What do you do?” Agent Rossi asked.  
  
“I’m an artist,” she said, looking at the ground in an uncharacteristically shy manner. Miranda thought Agent Rossi maybe reminded Lily of someone.  
  
So she supplied, “Lily does drawings. They’re good.”  
  
He nodded, smiling. “Interesting. A librarian, an artist, and an accountant.” Toby started and looked over. “Yes, Agent Correia, I know who you are. I’ve seen you around. Don’t you have a car?”  
  
Toby made a distressed noise. “Sh—oh, crap, my car!”  
  
“It broke down,” said Lily, sounding calm for the first time in hours. “Right before we—went there.”  
  
“It never breaks down,” Toby nearly wailed. “I called Triple A and oh  _God_.”  
  
Agent Rossi was pulling out his cell phone. “Don’t worry. I’ll have someone from the motor pool pick it up for you and take it to the shop.”  
  
Toby, in between breathing hysterically, told Rossi where they had left the car and Rossi made the arrangements. Miranda glanced at Lily again, who was still staring at the floor mats, before looking out the window, forehead pressed against the glass. The heat from her knee was seemingly radiating up her body and the cool from the window and the winter outside was nice.  
  
She still felt oddly numb though. Detached, really.  
  
Agent Rossi hung up his phone. “They’ll meet you in the motor pool.”  
  
“Okay,” said Toby, from between his legs. He had bent down at one point, trying to even his breathing. He was having marginal success.  
  
Half smiling, Agent Rossi asked, “Do you want a paper bag?”  
  
He looked up. “Do you have one?”  
  
Agent Rossi chuckled and Toby put his head down again.  
  
“That car’s your baby, eh?” he asked.  
  
Toby’s shoulders moved. “It was my dad’s.”  
  
Agent Rossi looked out the window, at the road, and said nothing. Lily shifted beside Miranda and Miranda looked out the window again.  _Fathers_ , she thought.  
  
The rest of the trip was fairly silent, outside of the classical music still playing softly.  
  
When they were back in the FBI building, the car parked away, Rossi escorted them to the lobby. Toby shifted on his feet and said to Agent Rossi, “Thanks for dealing with my car, sir.”  
  
Nodding, Agent Rossi said, “Not a problem, Agent Correia. And don’t call me sir. Makes me feel old.”  
  
Toby gave a strangled sounding laugh. He glanced at Miranda and Lily, shifting on his feet once more. He looked like he might try to hug them for a moment but he settled for an awkward duel punch on the shoulders before shoving his hands in his pockets. “Well, I have to go see to my car and get a new pair of glasses. I’d say this was great but, uh, you know. I just—aw, man, had a good time is shitty too. Um, er, I liked being with you,” he said, staring at Miranda. He added, “Both of you. Well, later.”  
  
He trotted off. Agent Rossi chuckled and Lily looked dangerously close to having her lips quirked up. A moment passed.  
  
“Miranda,” said Agent Rossi.  
  
She looked at him.  
  
“I’m sorry for,” he started. He shook his head. “No, that’s not—I was an asshole and I’m—oh, I. Christ.”  
  
He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead and sighed. He dropped it and looked at the ceiling, emotions passing freely across his face: guilt, anger, happiness, sadness, relief.  
  
All of a sudden, Agent Rossi wrapped on arm around Miranda’s shoulders and pulled her in close, doing the same with Lily using his other. He held them for a moment. Miranda’s nose was smushed into Agent Rossi’s shoulder and one of her eyes was forced to near closing, but she could still see Lily and her wild blond hair. They shared a confused look.  
  
“Thank you,” said Agent Rossi, quietly, and then gave them a tight squeeze before releasing them.  
  
Miranda tried not to look freaked out when she was standing in front of him once more; she was not exactly used to people touching her. And Lily—well, she was surprised Lily hadn’t had some sort of mental episode at the embrace.  
  
“You two get home now,” said Rossi. “How do you get home?”  
  
“Metro,” supplied Lily. Miranda nodded.  
  
“Safe trip,” he said. “I have paperwork.”  
  
He grinned widely, which looked strange on his face. He laughed then too, like it was all some great joke, and went to the elevators.  
  
After he had gone, Lily said, “Weird. Effing weird.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Miranda. “I never expected Mr. Rossi to do that.”  
  
Lily nodded and then said, “Take me home, Manda.”  
  
They left the lobby and walked through the snow to the metro stop, kicking at clumps beneath their feet and at their toes. They went through the turnstiles as usual, got on the proper line, and found seats next to one another. Lily stared straight ahead and Miranda looked down at her hands.  
  
She was still wearing Toby’s gloves. She thought about Guinevere in the stories, and how she had loved Arthur and Lancelot too, and him more in the end.  
  
“What should we have for dinner?” asked Lily, quietly. “It’s your turn.”  
  
“I know,” said Miranda. “I’m not sure.”  
  
  
  
They ordered in Chinese. They didn’t eat most of it.  
  
  
  
In the shower the next morning, Miranda saw her knee had gone black and blue and she found ten little circle bruises on her upper arms, five on each. She crossed her arms and, under the steady stream of hot water, put her hands against them, measuring her fingers in the spaces. Her hands were too small, only grazing the edges of the purpling marks. She poked them, one at a time, and started to cry.


	5. part five

Two days after that, after being debriefed like she never imagined she would be by some of the upstairs people in the FBI and her own superiors, Miranda came to work to find flowers on her desk, a bouquet of agrimony, Canterbury bells, Stars of Bethlehem, and snowdrops. The card said they came from the really expensive florist on O Street and that they were from E. Prentiss. Next to the pretty glass vase, there was a stack of files, also from E. Prentiss. On a Post-It, she wrote,  _If you could get caught up in these_.  
  
Miranda smiled upon seeing them and drew strength from Prentiss’s faith in her. She grabbed up the stack of files, tucking them under one arm, and, Toby’s gloves in her free hand, she road the elevator up to level five, to Accounts Payable.  
  
She found him, after asking quietly around and pretending the files she carried were for him—decoy files, she called them in her head and, really, she was getting pretty good at this espionage thing—at his desk in his cubicle; he had a poster of the Led Zeppelin hermit and the lyrics to Stairway on one wall. He was listening to music as he worked someone’s account book on paper, nodding his head.  
  
“Miranda,” he said, when he saw her, pulling the headphones from his ears.  
  
“Here,” she said, thrusting the gloves into his hands.  
  
“Thanks,” he said, staring at them. “You know, you could have kept them.”  
  
“They’re yours,” she said.  
  
Toby kind of nodded to himself, tapping his pencil rapidly on his desk. Miranda looked around.  
  
“I like your cubicle,” she told him, quietly.  
  
He smiled. “Zeppelin.”  
  
“Yeah,” she said.  
  
“So, I’m doing a Halo night,” said Toby, twirling the pencil between his fingers, “next Thursday at seven. It’s going to be me and some of the other accountants and Kevin from tech, who said he’s going to try to bring Penelope, and I wanted to know if you’d like to come.” When she started to shake her head, he said, “You could be on my team?”  
  
“I don’t know how to play Halo,” she said, shrugging. “I’d probably make you lose.”  
  
“You can come earlier and I could teach you,” Toby suggested. Miranda noticed he was rubbing his eyebrow nervously as he added, “We could have some pizza and I could teach you. I bet you’d be really good.”  
  
Miranda bit the inside of her mouth as he stared at her with an earnest smile. She could see the pale line of healing flesh where it had been split open, those days ago out in the snow. Eventually, she nodded. “Okay.”  
  
“Five fine?” he asked. She nodded again and his smile grew. He said, “I’ll e-mail you directions.”  
  
Miranda smiled back at him and thought he looked kind of cute, beaming like that.  
  
“So, d’you want lunch?” asked Toby. His voice sounded a little hi.  
  
“Sure,” said Miranda.  
  
He grinned again, shooting up from his desk, and grabbing her by her elbow, leading her out. Out in the hallway before the elevator, he seemed to realize he still had a hold on her and let go of her elbow, his cheeks turning pink. Miranda blinked, a little confused; there were just some human quirks that escaped her, and a lot of them seemed to be integral to Toby’s base personality. She doubted she’d ever figure him out, not like other things.  
  
They got their normal lunches and sat at their normal table, though, this time, it was together at once and Toby pulled her chair out for her. They talked like they normally did, though Toby’s cheeks seemed to get pinker, again to Miranda’s confusion.  
  
Toby asked about Spencer. Miranda said she hadn’t seen him. They were fairly quiet after that.  
  
Once finished, Toby offered to walk her back to the archives. Miranda, just utterly thrown for a loop, nodded and let him.  
  
In Archives Four, Agent Morgan was seated at Miranda’s desk, startling her so badly she dropped the files she was carrying. Toby blinked at Morgan and then bent to grab them. Miranda just stared.  
  
“Sorry,” said Morgan, going to help Toby.   
  
When the files were cleaned up, Toby put them on Miranda’s desk and made some polite noises about having some bills to look over before retreating. He stopped in the doorway though and gave Morgan a long, intense stare that seemed to amuse him, before Toby managed to leave. Morgan turned to look at Miranda, afterwards, and his smile was warm. He told her, chuckling a little, “He seems nice.”  
  
Miranda nodded. She wasn’t sure what was so funny.  
  
“I wanted to thank you,” said Morgan. “I didn’t get a chance to, and I wanted to say thanks for not giving up, like we did.”  
  
“You  _never_  gave up, don’t  _ever_  think you did,” she said immediately, her voice loud in her quiet basement. She clapped a hand over her mouth.  
  
Morgan chuckled again. “You’re sweet, Miss Jones.”  
  
She stared at him, her hand dropping from her mouth. “But it’s true.”  
  
“Maybe,” he said, with a sad little shrug.  
  
Miranda felt like stamping one of her feet on the floor and throwing her arms out; she felt like screaming at the top of her lungs.  
  
“It  _is_ ,” she repeated, firmly. “You all looked for so long, you had hope. Even after you were taken off the case. You tried for weeks and months, even after. It is true.”  
  
“Then why did you find him?” Morgan asked.  
  
“That doesn’t matter,” she told him. “You kept his desk empty.”  
  
“We kept his desk empty because we never got another agent,” he said.  
  
“No,” Miranda disagreed. “Well, maybe that’s part of it, but you still knew that he’d come home to you. You all loved him and you kept that desk empty because you knew that someday, somebody, maybe you, maybe not—whoever it was, they would find wherever he was and they would bring him back to you.”  
  
Morgan stared at her for a long, drawn moment. “Miss Jones, have you ever thought about becoming a profiler?”  
  
She shook her head.  
  
“You should,” he said.  
  
“I’m just a librarian,” said Miranda.  
  
“A librarian,” he repeated. “A librarian, maybe, but one who went out, with an accountant and—what does your blonde friend do?”  
  
“Lily’s an artist,” she supplied.  
  
“Thank you,” he said. “A librarian who went out with an accountant and an artist, and found someone teams of people had been searching years for, all because you found and opened his file.”  
  
 _I didn’t open the file,_  she thought.  _His picture fell out and he found me._  
  
“Anyway,” said Morgan. “Thank you, for doing what we couldn’t.”  
  
She looked at the floor, wanting to tell him that they could have, that they would have if she hadn’t come along, but she didn’t want to argue with him anymore. She liked it when he wasn’t mad at her, when he was happy.   
  
“Sure,” Miranda said.  
  
“I mean it,” he said.  
  
“I know,” she told him. “I do too.”  
  
And she did. She knew that Morgan was grateful for what she and Lily and Toby had done for them. She imaged it was strange, though, for them to be the ones who were connected with the victims and having someone else swoop in and protect their loved ones from danger.  
  
She meant, they had gone through the whole connection with the victim thing—Spencer’s other kidnappings, other shootings, other moments—but they saved the day, in the end. They closed the case. With this newest moment, the case got broken up and closed by someone else.  
  
They had to be feeling such a strange sense of gratitude and resentment. She imagined that relief overwhelmed everything else though, and happiness.  
  
Miranda looked at Morgan, who looked so relaxed and at peace, staring around her dark archives.  
  
This was what happy people looked like, she figured. They looked just like that. And he’d be happy now, and for a long time yet.  
  
“You know, this is the most I’ve ever heard you speak,” Morgan said.  
  
“I’ve met my monthly quota, yes,” she heard herself saying, making him laugh once more.  
  
“I really have to come down here more often,” he told her. “You’re a riot, Miranda.”  
  
Miranda smiled down at the floor. “Thank you, Agent Morgan.”  
  
“Call me Derek,” he said, starting towards the door.  
  
She thought,  _Oh my God._  
  
“Seriously,” he said. “I’d like it if you’d call me Derek. I know you don’t call anyone by their first names, but I believe I heard a rumor Agent Jareau is now Miss J.J.”  
  
Miranda felt slightly trapped and she honestly had no idea what to say. Calling Agent Jareau Miss J.J. had been a spur of the moment thing; it had just tumbled off her tongue and out of her mouth before her brain could sensor it, honest! She hadn’t meant to say it. She’d just meant to say thank you and nothing else.  
  
 _Stupid mouth,_  she thought.  
  
“Maybe you should think about it,” said Morgan, as if sensing Miranda’s inner turmoil. “Get back to me on it.”  
  
She nodded, sighing quietly in relief at being off the hook.  
  
“Just remember,” he said. “I don’t really ever take no for an answer, so you’ll probably be calling me Derek within a week, just to get me to leave you alone.”  
  
Miranda seriously doubted that one but didn’t say anything.  
  
They were quiet for a long moment. Miranda absently shuffled some papers on her desk.  
  
“So,” Morgan said, glancing around the room. “I had a couple other things I had come down here to say. Rossi says hi, by the way, and wanted to know if your Toby got his car all right.”  
  
“He did,” she said. Toby told her he was going to have to replace the alternator though, which would be hard, because basically no one had a car like his anymore. Also, his mechanic still wasn’t sure why the Datsun had started smoking like that. Toby wasn’t that concerned, which really concerned Miranda.  
  
“Did you get Prentiss’s flowers?” he asked.  
  
Miranda nodded, pointing at her desk.  
  
“Oh, and I was wondering if you’d like to go see Reid with me,” he said, adding it on like a casual after thought. “He’s been asking about you, you know.”  
  
She thought again,  _Oh my God._  
  
“He wants to meet the woman who found him,” Morgan was saying. “And I told him I’d see what I could do, but she spends a lot of time holed up in the archives, in the dark, with no windows. And then he started asking if he could see any of our latest cases—”  
  
“Yes,” said Miranda, quickly.  
  
“He can look at our cases?” he asked. Miranda was almost positive he was just messing with her. “Or that you want to come? Because I’m pretty sure you don’t have the authority to give him files.”  
  
“To go with you, yes,” she said, mainly because she didn’t want to tell Morgan that she was pretty sure she didn’t have the authority to do a lot of the things that she had gotten up to these last few months but it hadn’t stopped her any.  
  
“Good,” he said. “Like I said, he really would like to meet you.”  
  
“I’d like to meet him too.” Even though she felt, sometimes, like she all ready knew everything about him.  
  
Except for the sound of his voice. She didn’t know what that was yet.  
  
She was aching to find out.  
  
“That’s good,” he said again. “When are you free?”  
  
 _Now, now, now!_  She thought the words really hard, like maybe Morgan would be able to hear them.  
  
“How about tomorrow?” he asked.  
  
For one hysterical second, Miranda thought that she had developed psychic powers. She allowed herself a quick daydream about fighting crime alongside the members of the BAU, with her own trusty team of Toby and Lily, and how Spencer would think she was brilliant, before she realized that Morgan had probably been planning this whole thing since that morning.  
  
He’d probably had Miss Penelope hack her computer or something and knew she had the day off.  
  
Miranda blinked at the sudden change in name but then she decided she liked it, like maybe she liked Miss J.J. and the possibility of calling Morgan Derek.  
  
“Tomorrow’s good,” she said aloud.  
  
“Okay,” he said. “I had Garcia look up your address and I’ll come pick you up around noon.”  
  
She nodded.  
  
“Now,” Morgan added, very seriously. “There’s another rumor floating around about a Halo night that an account, name of Correia in Payable, has, that my technical analyst goes to. I was wondering if I could score an invite.”  
  
It took Miranda moment to puzzle out what exactly he was saying but then she smiled, a little conspiratorially, and said, “I’ll see what I can do. I know the man in charge.”  
  
Morgan left, his laughter echoing in his wake through all of Archives Four.  
  
  
  
The next morning, Lily was laying across Miranda’s bed, her sketchbook open and completely ignoring that she was there to perform her duty as best friend and help Miranda pick out something to wear.  
  
“Just wear the purple sweater,” said Lily, not looking up. “You look good in the royal color.”  
  
“And my pencil skirt?” asked Miranda.  
  
Lily nodded absently. “And your pencil skirt. The tweed one.”  
  
“But what about shoes?” she asked.  
  
At this, Lily did look up. “You own another pair besides the black monstrosities?”  
  
“Go away,” said Miranda, putting on the clothes they had decided upon. She looked at her black shoes and then went for the ones that Lily had bought her for Christmas two years ago, that she never wore.  
  
“It was an honest question,” said Lily, sitting up on the bed. She tore out a piece of paper from her sketchbook and handed it to her. “Give that to Spencer. I drew it for him.”  
  
Miranda looked at it. She had drawn a series of little portraits of the members of the BAU.  
  
“He’ll like it,” Miranda said.  
  
“Mm,” said Lily. She hopped off the bed, wandering out as she announced, “I’m going to mat my commission on the living room floor.”  
  
“You just want to see Agent Morgan,” muttered Miranda. Lily “Bat-Ears” Flanigan waved a hand over her shoulder. Miranda shook her head and wedged on her shoes with more vigor than strictly necessary before joining Lily in the living room.  
  
At two minutes passed noon—exactly enough time to allow Miranda to whip herself, and Lily, into a minor frenzy, their buzzer rang. Lily, unceremoniously dropping her tools, ran to the window in the kitchen that overlooked the street. Miranda nodded to herself and answered.  
  
“Hello?” she said.  
  
“Hey, Miss Jones,” said Morgan, his voice tiny and far.  
  
“I’ll be right down,” she told him. Lily groaned in the kitchen, wanting to see him again, but Miranda grabbed her coat and valise and threw the door shut behind her, practically flying down the stairs to her lobby. Morgan was waiting outside the doors and he smiled when he saw her.  
  
“Nice building,” he commented when she came out. She nodded her thanks. Morgan walked them to a car in front of them and opened her door. “In you go.”  
  
She climbed in and they drove in near silence, Miranda twisting the hem of her skirt in her fingers.  
  
She kept doing it all the way to GW Hospital and, in the parking lot, Morgan reached out and stilled her hands.  
  
“He doesn’t look good Miranda,” he said, voice low. “He could look worse but it’s still not good. I just want you to prepare yourself. He’s not like his picture.”  
  
She didn’t care. It was Spencer. She wouldn’t care if he was unconscious or badly disfigured or anything. She hated hospitals and sick people but she wanted to see him. She wanted to meet him. All she knew of him was those cases; and she felt like she knew him since forever, had been in love with him since forever, but it wasn’t true. She never even heard him speak. And now she had her chance.  
  
Miranda felt giddy. Morgan, apparently satisfied, unbuckled himself and climbed from the car. Miranda was moments behind him and he led her into the hospital, flashing his badge as he went. She trailed after him, ignoring the urge to grab the ends of his leather jacket so she wouldn’t get left behind.  
  
The room he took her to was on the seventh floor and, inside, SSA Hotchner was reading aloud to Spencer.  
  
When she and Morgan entered, his melodic voice stopped reading. He put the book down and stared at them. But Miranda only had eyes for Spencer, who was gaunt and gray, skin almost waxen from lack of sunlight and proper food, and his eyes were closed, resting. The dark circles under his eyes were more prominent than usual and his mouth seemed inhumanly wide, corners upturned in half a smile.  
  
Miranda felt suddenly like an intruder on their lives, more so than ever before.  
  
But SSA Hotchner, whose eyes were dark and blank and with a blink was everything and nothing of the man who had smiled on the porch some days ago, nodded at her.  
  
“Reid,” he said, “this is Miranda Jones.”  
  
Spencer opened his eyes and looked at her. She didn’t know what to do.  
  
“Let’s go get some coffee, Derek,” SSA Hotchner suggested then. Morgan nodded and SSA Hotchner said over his shoulder, “And don’t even try it, Doctor Reid.”  
  
Spencer frowned at him. It looked strange on his wan and waxy face.  
  
They watched the pair of agents go, and then it was just they two in the room. Miranda felt her heart in her throat. Spencer quirked a small smile again.  
  
“Hi,” he said.  
  
He didn’t sound anything like she thought he would. It was perfect.  
  
“Hi,” she said back.  
  
“You found me,” he told her.  
  
Miranda nodded and stared at his improbably high cheekbones and damp hair. She felt warm and cold all over.  
  
“Ah,” he said, leaning back into his pillows. She wondered if SSA Hotchner had been the one to prop them up, or if it had been a nurse.  
  
“My friend Lily drew this for you,” said Miranda, breaking the silence of the hospital room. She searched in her valise for a moment and then pulled the piece of drawing paper out.  
  
“The girl who was with you?” Spencer took it, long boney fingers like pieces of pale driftwood, and stared at the faces of his friends. Miranda did the latch on her valise up again, nervously.  
  
“Tell her thank you,” he said, after a moment as he gently set it down on the table beside him. He stared at it for another moment. “She’s very good.”  
  
“It’s what she does for a living,” said Miranda.  
  
“I draw some,” he said.  
  
“You should draw something for her,” she suggested, “if you’re up to it. She likes seeing other people’s art.”  
  
“I’m not as much of a realist as she is,” he said.  
  
“That doesn’t matter,” Miranda said quietly.  
  
They fell silent again. Miranda scuffed the bottom of her shoe against the floor.  
  
“Oh, and I brought you some of the cases you wanted,” she said.  
  
“How did you know?” he asked. He paused and then Spencer said, like he should have guessed it earlier, “Morgan.”  
  
“I think he knew I’d take the bait,” Miranda admitted, undoing the latch on her valise again. “I can’t seem to leave well enough alone.”  
  
“That’s okay. I never could either,” he said. He sounded like he meant it too.  
  
“Really?” she said, fingers splayed out across the cool surface of the folders she had retrieved. There were a lot of them.  
  
“Morgan said you read the cases about me,” said Spencer.  
  
“Yes,” she said.  
  
“Then,” he said, “you know what I’m like.”  
  
She shrugged. “Not really.”  
  
“No,” he disagreed. “That’s my entire profile, all those moments.”  
  
Miranda sat quietly for a moment and then told him, “I just don’t think it was everything.”  
  
“Well,” Spencer said. “I never could leave well enough alone. I always need an answer.”  
  
 _A clear cut ending,_  she thought.  
  
“Do you want the cases?” she asked.  
  
“Yes,” he said. “I should hide them before the others come back. Though, knowing them, they’ll probably just know I have something I shouldn’t.”  
  
Her eyebrows went up. “They do that?”  
  
“Hotch is a father,” he told her, like that explained everything.  
  
She smiled at that, mainly because she was sure they both knew that was a lie.  
  
Miranda finished fishing out the rest of the files out of her bag and handed the heavy stack to Spencer, who went about hiding them under his pillows, his sheets, in the side table, and wherever he could reach. He was good at hiding things and she remembered: magic.  
  
“You could fit a lot in there,” he said.  
  
“I can fit everything in here,” she agreed.  
  
“It reminds me of the bag I used to carry. I don’t suppose you have any coffee in there too?” Spencer asked.  
  
Miranda looked out the door that Morgan and SSA Hotchner had exited. She bit her lip.  
  
“Yeah, Hotch and the doctors have formed a cabal,” he told her with a little smile. “But I haven’t had coffee in—well, two years, I guess. It was two years, right?”  
  
“Yes,” she said.  
  
“I tried to keep count,” Spencer said, eyes on the far wall, “but I know I would lose days, if I was unconscious from something, or they had drugged me, or. And sometimes the windows would be blocked out for days. Intellectually,” he said, “intellectually, I knew the passage of time and I could count it, but sometimes it was just so dark and all I wanted—I would have killed for some coffee.”  
  
She didn’t know what to say.  
  
“Why did you look for me?” he asked.  
  
“Your picture,” she said.  
  
“What about it?” asked Spencer.  
  
“It,” she tried. “I found it, one day, and—I started reading. Your cases. I felt—I felt like, I don’t know.”  
  
“That you knew me,” he said.  
  
Miranda jerked her head to the left in a half nod. “I guess.”  
  
“And you just looked,” he quietly said. “When everyone else couldn’t, you just looked.”  
  
“Yes. I couldn’t give up on you,” she said. “I believed.”  
  
Spencer smiled at her, heart achingly. “Thank you.”  
  
Miranda had believed in fairytales for a long time. She had dreamed of being the captive princess rescued and she believed in a world of chivalry and romance, and that when people got trapped, they got rescued. There was no one that got left unsaved, because even the innocent who fell got vengeance in the end, and there would always be happy endings. She believed in those fairytales of love, and was scared of them because she wasn’t sure anyone could love her back; but she had been halfway to loving Spencer anyway.  
  
The thing was, she had never believed she would meet him. That was why he was safe Her fairytale prince was trapped and she had never seen the princess as the savior until the moment she knew it had to be done.  
  
But now she saw that, even if she loved him, Spencer could never love her. He had the people he needed and maybe he needed Miranda too, but not the way she wanted to be needed by him. He had those people. It made her sad and yet—she was also still halfway to loving someone else and they were ready to meet her, and she was ready to be needed by them.  
  
“No,” she said. “Thank you.”  
  
“Why?” Spencer asked.  
  
“Because,” she began.  
  
There was a moment, a feeling brewing within Miranda. Maybe it started when she entered that cabin, or maybe it had been there the entire time since Spencer’s picture slipped from the front of that file and fell onto her floor—but there was this moment and this feeling in her. And now, it was coming on sudden, like a summer storm or an unexpected snowfall.  
  
People were not princes and princesses. People were  _people_. Because you were who you were. Everything else was a fantasy. Who you really were—that was the great thing.  
  
The castle that trapped you could have been made by your own hand or you could have been held captive against your will, but you would get free. That wasn’t the work of magic. That was the work of people.  
  
Spencer smiled at her again.  
  
He didn’t really look like his photograph anymore.  
  
 _If you had not have fallen,_  she thought,  _I would not have found you._  
  
“When you get out,” said Miranda, “Toby has a Halo night. Agent Morgan wants to come, and Miss Penelope and Kevin go too. And all the accountants, but I thought you’d like to know about the others more. Toby says it’s fun.”  
  
“I don’t know how to play,” he said.  
  
“That’s okay, Spencer,” she told him, “we’ll teach you.”  
  
  
  
Agent Hotchner wrote, Miranda remembered, near the end of his report:  _I never called him Spencer. I should have, at least once._  
  
It made her happy to think that he had the chance now. They all had chances.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 _Across the silent stream  
Where the dream-shadows go,  
From the dim blue Hill of Dream  
I have heard the west wind blow.  
                 William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod)_


End file.
